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Ask Your Advocate Jumaane D. Williams: June 2025

Ask the Brooklyn Borough President: June 2025

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News 12 Staff

0918askyouradvocatebblock

All right, welcome back to ask your advocate. We're here with Juan Williams taking your questions. The number of the call is 7188616800. To get in the conversation right now. We're going to go to Courtney from Bushwick Brooklyn. She's got a question for the public advocate, Courtney. Hey, you know, everyone's going on about wanting to do something about affordable housing and homelessness. But there's an easy fix that I feel that is being overlooked. Landlords are getting away with murder with over 100,000 apartments illegally destabilized and the tenants don't even know and also they warehousing more. It also takes DH cr almost I've been with Dr it's been 10 years in court over overcharges in my apartment, which is ridiculous because by that time most tenants have been priced out or evicted. What's being done to streamline the DHC R overcharge process and also start holding these landlords accountable. And that's a, that's a great question and, and thank you for that. It can actually take up the entirety of not just half an hour but an hour or two. Just to be clear. Uh HCR. And uh, I think, uh the caller goes back with me because we back in the day we called the DH CR it's now called uh HCR. It's actually a state agency. Um, so it doesn't fall on the city jurisdiction, but many of us have been pushing uh HCR to try to streamline the process. Like it's being uh spoken about. It's very difficult for tenants to navigate even if the tenants nowhere to go. Because most people think of H PDH P doesn't handle uh some of the rental uh things that the discussions and that will go to HCR. But the my office can help uh deal with a lot of those things that I would ask people to reach out to that as well. And hopefully that caller will get trouble damages, which is what she should get a triple the amount that that was lost. But in terms of destabilizing and warehousing, those are problems that we're fighting right now. Um The warehousing of apartments is tabulated. It is known about, I've heard from 6 $10,000 10,000 units up to 60,000 units and that's a lot of units in a, in a housing crisis. And we're trying to find a way to make sure that landlords can't wear house. We're also trying to encourage them and uh shout out to uh President Antonio Renos who's been pushing a plan to try to get the city to pay those owners to house some of the long time New Yorkers who are waiting for housing so that we could move some of the uh New New Yorkers into uh the shelter system, which is uh just burgeoning at, at this, uh which is just, you know, blowing up at this moment in time. Um So there are things that we've been pushing. Um It's very hard and I would say, you know, a lot of times elections do have consequences. And often time we're putting folks in positions, uh, that are getting a lot of money from the folks who are rich off of the system the way it is. And many times they're putting, you know, small one or two or small homeowners in the front line because they actually are struggling. We have to make sure we system, but sometimes they're covering the bigger guys, uh who actually are not doing as bad, but we wanna make sure that everybody can succeed in New York City, but you shouldn't succeed off the backs of other folks. And right now tenants are really, uh really suffering. So we wanna make sure we're doing work for both folks who are dealing with issues, but housing is a real, real problem and has been for decades and it's only gotten worse. And again, uh I've been dealing with issues for 27 years as an organizer, as a councilman now as a public advocate. And if we can get our, our leaders to listen and not just follow whoever is giving the biggest donation, so many things can get better for that caller and other folks as well. And if we're building housing, something is a, you know, I, I always worry about affordable housing because something is always affordable to someone. We have to be building income, targeted housing in a way that we just haven't been in. That's part of the reason that we got into this in the first place. Let's go to another question from Brooklyn. We have Leo in. This is a question that we got during the week for the public advocate about uh mental health, Leo public advocate Jamali Williams. This is a question for you. What has been put in place to improve mental health uh which is really destroying every fragment of the society topic long discussed. You know, here we are September 2023. What's being done? I mean, it's huge. What I was, I'm so happy of the amount of people who are speaking about mental health in a way that we weren't a decade ago. Um So that is a positive uh what is a negative? We still don't have the continuum of health that we need for people, particularly those who have acute um mental health uh issues and that's part of the problem and part of the things that we're trying to fix. But I will give a shout out to um the uh chancellor who has been trying to put some things in place for uh students to address this, but we need a whole bunch more. But like we have some schools that don't even have the adequate amount of social workers and even nurses to address this. But and what we have to realize is that I believe everybody needs a mental health checking in whether they have a mental health, acute crisis uh issue or not. Just like you need to check in the doctor, hopefully going to the dentist, let's get a check in and see how you doing. And what we do know is after the pandemic things have gotten worse. We have adults that are doing some of the wildest things and our, our, our temper and our anger has sparked like this because we haven't really addressed many of our mental health um issues that all of us are dealing with. And if we don't know how to deal with it positively comes out negatively. Now, imagine that in the young mind, right? And imagine that in our young people's mind uh in a way uh that we see how it plays out on the streets. And that's a problem. As a matter of fact, uh uh a good amount of people who are uh detained in Rikers Island are dealing with mental health issues. Probably the largest mental health institution in, right in North America is Rikers Island. And so until we address that issue in the way that that Paul has said, uh, we're gonna have a big problem and we can't send people with mental health issues to Rikers Island think it's gonna get better. That makes no one safer. And so unfortunately, there's still a lot more room to go. But I, I would, uh, you know, encourage people to call 1 800 NYC. Well, uh, they can also call 301 to try to connect, uh, to folks who can, who can assist. And I love what you said there. Just a simple check in, you know, it doesn't have to be a long time. It doesn't take a lot of effort. Just checking in with friends and family can really go a long way if everybody did that. I feel like we would be making some ground here. We're going to be here for a little bit longer with the public advocate. The number is 7188616800. Jean Williams is here answering your questions. We'll be right back.

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0918askyouradvocatecblock_2023-09-18-19-47-00

All right, welcome back to ask your advocate Jumana Williams is here. We're gonna kind of go a little faster now with their calls, we have Ken Roy on the phone from Concor Village with a question for the public advocate Ken Roy. Yes. Go ahead. What's your question? Yeah, good afternoon, Mr Mr Williams. Um Yeah, my problem is um crime, crime mom. I live in, you know, I live on 100 and 67th street, um bordered by the Concourse and um Morris Avenue, um Morris Avenue, um near Yankee Stadium and um it's like really rampant, you know. Um it, it's as though the criminals are just running um, the streets. I can't, I, you know, IIII I do a out after six o'clock at night, you know, you can hear the shots going off. You see no cops, nowhere people are dropping like flies and um I don't hear anybody trying to um to, to solve this issue, you know. Um All I see is people that is on the street that's been released, released, released. Nobody's getting put away for the crimes that they're committing. And it's frightening. I live in New York since 1970 and I've never seen it like that. You know, what do you say to, to New Yorkers? Like Ken Roy that are a little scared. Yeah, I'm so sorry that, uh, Ken Roy feels that way and he's experiencing those things and I think it's expressing the feelings of a lot of New Yorkers and we can't ignore it. One. I wanna make sure that we're always talking about people being safe and actually feeling safe. You can actually be safe and not feel safe. And both of those things are really bad and we don't want to know what people are actually dealing with. And I, I would say there are some, uh, data points mean nothing if you're a victim of crime. But thankfully, murders and shootings are down, there are some Felonious crimes that have gone up but some of the way that we've discussed this, no one would believe that murders and shootings are down. No one believe that we're doing, uh, making arrests with gun arrests, which we are. I'm not sure that people believe that there's more folks in Rikers Island now than before the pandemic. It seems like based on what people have been pushing and partly actually even the administration who was erroneously pushing bail as an issue for the crime rising, which it just never was even now, they can't even benefit from some of the lower crime numbers because they've done such a good job of hyping everybody up. But with that said, there are some real things that we have to be doing. And I do have to say if you've been, if you lived in the city through the eighties and nineties, like I have, you've actually been through a period where things were just much worse. The murder rate, the shooting rate was incredible. So I wanna take space to just say actually, we're doing a little bit better, but that means nothing to Kroy. It means nothing to the people or victims of crime. We have to do so much more. We know that our law enforcement partners, we want to see them do their job. The problem becomes when we rely on them solely to do that. And that's part of the problem and we have to make sure everybody plays their part. And even when we're discussing mental health, uh, one of the things that we can do, even as human beings, when people say, hey, what's up? How you doing? We should actually listen. A lot of times we don't, sometimes we see young people in the street. We don't say hello. We don't say good morning, we don't say good night. That's an issue as well. So what we wanna do is put forth a plan that has been put forth with the, the, the, uh, the mayor and really push that forward and hopefully when I come back, we could expand this a little bit more because I know we're about to wrap up, but that's an important question for Ken Roy and he's right to bring it up and we're right to respond. We got about 30 seconds. There is a way to keep in touch with you, bro. Uh Public advocate. I rather uh tell, tell us about that. Yes. The QR code that you see now we have a chat bot. We introduced the last time we were here, we're excited about it. Uh, please uh get that QR code. You can talk to our office. You can sign up for our newsletter for our magazines that go out. Find out about what we're doing around public safety, around gun violence in particular, please uh check it out. Get involved. Absolutely. A chance to stay in touch with Juan Williams. We appreciate you giving us the time on this Monday evening. Public advocate. Thank you, peace, everybody.

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News 12's Dan Serafin sat down with New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams for the September 2023 edition of Ask Your Advocate. 

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