District Council 37, the city’s largest public sector union, has asked the City Council to lift the residency rules prohibiting thousands of government workers from living outside the city. The union said soaring prices make it virtually impossible for many of the workers it represents to find affordable housing in New York.
While there is a patchwork of laws governing residency requirements, DC 37 is supporting Intro 452, a bill that would extend to city employees the privileges already enjoyed by others. While Police Commissioner Ray Kelly must live in New York City, police and prison guards don’t have to live in the city proper, so long as they live in one of the six surrounding communities. Firefighters must live in one of the 11 counties in New York State. Teachers can live anywhere they want.
“We have 50,000 men and women imprisoned by this residency requirement,” DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts told The Amsterdam News . “The City Council holds the key, and we’re doing everything we can to convince them to loosen the residency requirement so our members can find affordable housing.”
The provision to “modify the residency restrictions to allow employees to live in Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Orange, Rockland and Putnam counties” was part of the 2006 union contract negotiated with the city and ratified resoundingly by 98.5 percent of the union members. The provision is subject to approval by the City Council.
Roberts said she doesn’t understand why some councilmembers oppose the measure, particularly since DC 37 members currently living in their districts need it. Suggesting petty politics might be at the heart of the matter, Roberts said one council member told her the union should have consulted him before negotiating that particular provision in the current contract.
The debate over residency requirements is not new, but it gained traction in the 1970s when white flight to suburbia left city lawmakers trying to stem the tide of a stable tax base leaving the city. Government employees were the solution to the problem. Some, largely white groups of the city employees, won exemptions from these restrictions.
Councilmember Robert Jackson (D-West Harlem) is a vocal opponent of the DC 37-backed legislation. “I am pretty adamant for not opening jobs for people outside New York City,” Jackson said.
Roberts said that position doesn’t make sense since thousands of teachers, firefighters, police, corrections and sanitation workers already enjoy the privilege.
Paul Washington, former head of the Black firefighters’ group, the Vulcan Society, supports the DC 37-backed bill. So do 21 other members of the Black and Hispanic Caucus of the City Council.
Citing the flurry of “beautiful high-rise towers filled with million-dollar, one-bedroom apartments” springing up throughout the city, Roberts pointed to the opposite end of the spectrum and the tsunami of conversions sweeping the middle-income housing market and threatening to wash away the city’s affordable housing stock.
In a recent meeting with the City Council’s Black and Hispanic Caucus, Roberts said, “I explained why we felt residency requirements should be lifted. We’re not talking about people who make a lot of money.” And, he added, this is a life-or-death issue for many workers and their families. Five city workers lost their jobs last year when it was discovered that they did not live in the city.
Residency restrictions “impose intolerable financial burdens on middle-class workers with average salaries in the low 30s,” she insisted. Responding to charges that she recently threatened lawmakers who did not support the DC 37-backed legislation, Roberts read a mildly worded letter sent on behalf of the DC 37 executive board to all members of the City Council urging support for Intro 452.
Calling the lifting of the residency requirements an “equal rights” issue, Roberts urged union members to “stay ready” to take “whatever action it takes – political of otherwise – to enforce our contract and win our rights.”
