New York

A High-Profile Primary Tests Black Buffalo’s Political Power Structure

Published

2 years ago

June 26, 2023

BUFFALO — They are two of the most prominent Black women in Buffalo politics: India Walton, a celebrated progressive insurgent, jarred by a painful election loss; and Zeneta Everhart, a rising newcomer, galvanized by a singular terrifying event.

They are both Democrats in a deep-blue city, each with fervent supporters in the tight-knit Black community that makes up Buffalo’s East Side. They say they are friends; they wish the best for each other.

But for now, they are opponents.

Ms. Walton and Ms. Everhart are competing in Tuesday’s Democratic primary to represent the Masten district on the city’s Common Council — a battle between two candidates who have earned national attention under very different circumstances.

A stronghold of Black political power, the Masten Park neighborhood was also the site of one of the city’s most traumatic events: the racist massacre last May of 10 people, all of whom were Black, by a white gunman at a Tops supermarket. The tragedy suddenly thrust Ms. Everhart into the headlines.

Her son, Zaire Goodman, was one of only three people shot that day to survive. Shaken and infuriated, she soon found herself speaking out, including during a trip to Capitol Hill, where she testified that the nation had been founded on “violence, hate and racism.”

“I continuously hear after every mass shooting that this is not who we are as Americans, and as a nation,” Ms. Everhart said. “Hear me clearly: This is exactly who we are.”

Ms. Walton, who shocked Democratic leaders across the state and nation with her June 2021 primary defeat of Byron Brown, the city’s long-serving mayor, only to lose to his write-in campaign during the general election, agrees with Ms. Everhart on the many problems facing Black communities in Buffalo and the nation beyond.

But Ms. Walton, a democratic socialist who has worked as a nurse and community organizer, draws a sharp contrast between herself and her opponent, who works as the director of diversity and inclusion for a local state senator, Tim Kennedy.

“I am a person that acknowledges that the condition of Buffalo — the racism, the systemic racism, redlining, food deserts — are not by happenstance,” Ms. Walton, 41, said in an interview. “They are the result of policy decisions by people who are currently in power. I am not tied to those people.”

Indeed, in some ways, the race can be seen as a proxy battle in the struggle between New York’s moderate and more liberal candidates, something that has played out again and again since a resurgent left wing helped Democrats win solid majorities in the State Legislature in 2018.

Ms. Everhart, 42, a former television news producer, has impressed members of the state’s Democratic establishment, including Senator Chuck Schumer, who endorsed her earlier this month. She was also the senator’s guest at the State of the Union in February.

Mr. Kennedy, a Democrat who represents Buffalo’s East Side in the State Senate, said Ms. Everhart, who has worked for him for six years, had a unique ability “to connect with people” in Masten.

“If you care about the community and you’re dedicated to doing good things in and for the community,” he said, “There is a place for you in government.”

In an interview, Ms. Everhart said she thought the impact of “5/14” — the date of the Tops attack — was still being felt in Buffalo.

“5/14 opened the world’s eyes to the East Side of Buffalo,” she said, adding that issues like food insecurity, education, and the lack of safe housing and mental health services were suddenly given new attention after the attack.

“Buffalo has remained in the mainstream media for over a year, because 10 people were killed and taken from us, three others were seriously injured and a whole community was traumatized,” she said.

After her upset victory in the mayoral primary, Ms. Walton quickly found herself on CNN and other outlets, her win hailed as evidence of the surging power of the party’s progressive candidates.

“If you are in an elected office right now, you are being put on notice,” Ms. Walton said at the time of her primary victory. “We are coming.”

But that proclamation proved premature, as Mr. Brown — who is Buffalo’s first Black mayor and has served since 2006 — staged an unlikely write-in campaign during the general election.

With some support from Republicans, who warned of a socialist taking over a large American city, and the backing of loyal Democratic voters who had come to know him through his four terms in office, Mr. Brown handily defeated Ms. Walton that November, denying her the opportunity to become the city’s first female mayor.

That loss stung even more, she said, as she watched Buffalo struggle through a series of crises, including a December blizzard that killed more than 30 people, a majority of them Black, something that a recent report found was partially the fault of poor performance by city officials.

“There was never a question in my mind that I still need to serve the community of Buffalo,” Ms. Walton said, in an interview, adding, “And I think that Masten was the perfect place for me to continue my political career and my career of service.”

Like Ms. Everhart, Ms. Walton says that the East Side’s problems — poverty, lack of opportunity and poor health outcomes — were exposed by the shooting.

As were, she says, those who are to blame.

“The same people who showed up to decry white supremacy and say that we need investment in the East Side of Buffalo are the same people who’ve been governing for decades who are responsible for the condition of this community to begin with,” Ms. Walton said.

As she did with the mayor’s race, Ms. Walton, who has worked for and been endorsed by the New York Working Families Party, a left-wing group, has cast the race in Masten as one between herself and Democratic elites, noting that the Erie County Democratic Committee has endorsed Ms. Everhart.

“Zeneta is a lovely person,” said Ms. Walton, saying that the two had worked on community issues together in the past. “She and I are very friendly with one another. But her candidacy is an extension of the mayor.”

Ms. Everhart, who is making her first run for public office, rejects this notion.

“People say, you know, she’s a part of the establishment,” Ms. Everhart said. “No, first and foremost, I am Zeneta Everhart. I am my own woman always and forever. But if I am going to change my community and change my city and change the world, I need everybody at the table. I don’t care who hates who.”

On Buffalo’s East Side, which was targeted by the shooter because of its large Black community, there are strong sentiments about both candidates.

In front of Tops, which now lies just outside the Masten district after a redrawing of the Common Council lines last year, Dominique Calhoun, a paralegal and former candidate for county office, said in an interview that she supported Ms. Walton.

To her, housing — not the shooting — is the most important issue in the district.

She said she had rented a home in the neighborhood without knowing that it contained dangerously high levels of lead, which led to her son getting sick.

“India Walton had seen the story about my son, and she’s reached out to me,” Ms. Calhoun said. “And she’s reached out to other people who have been affected by the conditions of homes that should have never been rented out.”

Earlier this month, at a vibrant Juneteenth parade that ran along Masten’s borders, another resident, Mary Mack, said she planned to vote for Ms. Everhart. She described her chosen candidate as “more poised” than Ms. Walton, whose outspoken political style Ms. Mack viewed as a liability.

“Fighting people, sometimes they fight too quick,” Ms. Mack said. “So I will go for someone that I think is more planted and grounded in their lives.”

At the parade, Ms. Everhart seemed to be basking in the adulation of various elected officials — including Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Kennedy, who posed for photos with her — and her supporters.

She marched at the front of the parade route, just behind Mr. Brown and Gov. Kathy Hochul, while Ms. Walton followed about a mile behind, her float adorned with a defiant message: “Unbought and Unbossed.”

The two candidates did not appear to encounter each other at the parade, even as they both chatted with prospective voters.

For her part, Ms. Everhart says she and Ms. Walton have known each other for years and have “always gotten along.” But, she adds, her reasons for running have little to do with her opponent.

“I am not running against anyone,” she said. “I’m running for Masten.”

New York

Large Blaze Ravages Bronx Apartment Building, Leaving Many Displaced

Published

1 hour ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

Large Blaze Ravages Bronx Apartment Building, Leaving Many Displaced

Dozens of families were looking for shelter after a large fire broke out at an apartment building in the Bronx early Friday, injuring at least seven people, the Fire Department said. There were no fatalities or life-threatening injuries, according to officials.

About 250 firefighters and emergency medical responders rushed to a six-story residential building on Wallace Avenue near Arnow Avenue after a fire was reported there just before 2 a.m., the Fire Department said. The blaze on the top floor was elevated to a five-alarm fire about an hour later, it said.

Several dozen firefighters were still gathered outside the building at around 10 a.m. Many windows on the top floor were blown out and some had shards of glass hanging in place that resembled jagged teeth. Smoke continued to climb from the building as a firefighter on a ladder hosed the roof.

The fire was brought under control shortly before 2 p.m., according to fire officials.

The seven people who were injured included five firefighters, the department said in an email. One person was treated at the scene but declined to be taken to a hospital.

A spokeswoman for the Police Department said earlier that some people had suffered smoke inhalation injuries.

Robert S. Tucker, the fire commissioner, said during a news conference that it was a miracle that there had been no serious injuries or fatalities. Officials said that all of the apartments on the building’s top floor were destroyed.

Firefighters blasted water at the smoke and flames pouring out of the upper floors and roof, according to videos posted online by the Fire Department and television news outlets. Heavy winds had fueled the blaze, the department said.

The cause of the fire was under investigation, officials said.

The Red Cross was at the scene helping residents that were displaced by the fire, and a temporary shelter had been set up at the Bennington School on Adee Avenue nearby. Doreen Thomann-Howe, the chief executive of the American Red Cross Greater New York Region, said during the news conference that 66 families had already registered to receive assistance, including lodging. She said she expected that number to increase.

Juan Cabrera and his family were among those seeking help at the Bennington School. Mr. Cabrera said that he and his family had not heard a fire alarm but had instead heard glass breaking as residents climbed out of windows. He said he had also heard people race across the hall one flight above him while others screamed “Get out!”

Mr. Cabrera, 47, said he had smelled smoke and woke up his daughter, Rose, 13. He and his wife, Aurora Tavera, grabbed their IDs, passports and cellphones, and the family left the building.

“I felt desperate,” Ms. Taverna, 32, said.

“Thank God we are still alive,” said Mr. Cabrera, who works as a school aide and custodian and has lived in the building for five years. “The material stuff you can get back, but we have our family,” he said.

Louis Montalvo, 55, was also among those seeking help. He said firefighters banged on his door at around 3 a.m. and that he had smelled smoke.

“I am grateful to be around,” Mr. Montalvo said, as he stood outside of the temporary shelter. He was still wearing his felt pajama pants, which had snowmen printed on them.

Vanessa L. Gibson, the Bronx borough president, said she was “so grateful” there had been no fatalities from the fire.

The last major apartment fire in the Bronx occurred in 2022, and resulted in 17 deaths, which experts said were entirely preventable. Self-closing doors in the building did not work properly, allowing smoke to escape the apartment where the fire started and rapidly fill the structure’s 19 stories.

New York

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

Published

10 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

The Chinese government’s paranoia about overseas dissidents can seem strange, considering the enormous differences in power between exiled protesters who organize marches in America and their mighty homeland, a geopolitical and economic superpower whose citizens they have almost no ability to mobilize. But to those familiar with the Chinese Communist Party, the government’s obsession with dissidents, no matter where in the world they are, is unsurprising. “Regardless of how the overseas dissident community is dismissed outside of China, its very existence represents a symbol of hope for many within China,” Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who spent years in prison before being exiled to the United States in 1998, told me. “For the Chinese Communist Party, the hope for change among the people is itself a threat. Therefore, they spare no effort in suppressing and discrediting the overseas dissident community — to extinguish this hope in the hearts of people at home.”

To understand the party’s fears about the risks posed by dissidents abroad, it helps to know the history of revolutions in China. “Historically, the groups that have overthrown the incumbent government or regime in China have often spent a lot of time overseas and organized there,” says Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University. The leader Sun Yat-sen, who played an important role in the 1911 revolution that dethroned the Qing dynasty and led eventually to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, spent several periods of his life abroad, during which he engaged in effective fund-raising and political coordination. The Communist Party’s own rise to power in 1949 was partly advanced by contributions from leaders who were living overseas. “They are very sensitive to that potential,” Weiss says.

“What the Chinese government and the circle of elites that are running China right now fear the most is not the United States, with all of its military power, but elements of unrest within their own society that could potentially topple the Chinese Communist Party,” says Adam Kozy, a cybersecurity consultant who worked on Chinese cyberespionage cases when he was at the F.B.I. Specifically, Chinese authorities worry about a list of threats — collectively referred to as the “five poisons” — that pose a risk to the stability of Communist rule: the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, followers of the Falun Gong movement, supporters of Taiwanese independence and those who advocate for democracy in China. As a result, the Chinese government invests great effort in combating these threats, which involves collecting intelligence about overseas dissident groups and dampening their influence both within China and on the international stage.

Controlling dissidents, regardless of where they are, is essential to China’s goal of projecting power to its own citizens and to the world, according to Charles Kable, who served as an assistant director in the F.B.I.’s national security branch before retiring from the bureau at the end of 2022. “If you have a dissident out there who is looking back at China and pointing out problems that make the entire Chinese political apparatus look bad, it will not stand,” Kable says.

The leadership’s worries about such individuals were evident to the F.B.I. right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kable told me, describing how the Chinese worked to ensure that the running of the Olympic flame through San Francisco would not be disrupted by protesters. “And so, you had the M.S.S. and its collaborators deployed in San Francisco just to make sure that the five poisons didn’t get in there and disrupt the optic of what was to be the best Olympics in history,” Kable says. During the run, whose route was changed at the last minute to avoid protesters, Chinese authorities “had their proxies in the community line the streets and also stand back from the streets, looking around to see who might be looking to cause trouble.”

New York

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Published

18 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Thursday proposed several measures that would restrict hedge funds and private-equity firms from buying up large numbers of single-family homes, the latest in a string of populist proposals she intends to include in her State of the State address next week.

The governor wants to prevent institutional investors from bidding on properties in the first 75 days that they are on the market. Her plan would also remove certain tax benefits, such as interest deductions, when the homes are purchased.

The proposals reflect a nationwide effort by mostly Democratic lawmakers to discourage large firms from crowding out individuals or families from the housing market by paying far above market rate and in cash, and then leasing the homes or turning them into short-term rentals.

Activists and some politicians have argued that this trend has played a role in soaring prices and low vacancy rates — though low housing production is widely viewed as the main driver of those problems.

If Ms. Hochul was inviting a fight with the real estate interests who have backed her in the past, she did not seem concerned. She even borrowed a line from Jimmy McMillan, who ran long-shot candidacies for governor and mayor as the founder of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party.

“The cost of living is just too damn high — especially when it comes to the sky-high rents and mortgages New Yorkers pay every month,” Ms. Hochul said in a written statement.

James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said his team would review the proposal, but characterized it as “another example of policy that will stifle investment in housing in New York.”

The plan — the specifics of which will be negotiated with the Legislature — is one of several recent proposals the governor has made with the goal of addressing the state’s affordability crisis. Voters have expressed frustration about the high costs of housing and basic goods in the state. This discontent has led to political challenges for Ms. Hochul, who is likely to face rivals in the 2026 Democratic primary and in the general election.

In 2022, five of the largest investors in the United States owned 2 percent of the country’s single-family rental homes, most of them in Sun Belt and Southern states, according to a recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office. The report stated that it was “unclear how these investors affected homeownership opportunities or tenants because many related factors affect homeownership — e.g., market conditions, demographic factors and lending conditions.”

Researchers at Harvard University found that “a growing share of rental properties are owned by business entities and medium- and large-scale rental operators.”

State officials were not able to offer a complete picture of how widespread the practice was in New York. They said local officials in several upstate cities had told them about investors buying up dozens of homes at a time and turning them into rentals.

The New York Times reported in 2023 that investment firms were buying smaller buildings in places like Brooklyn and Queens from families and smaller landlords.

Ms. Hochul’s concern is that these purchases make it harder for first-time home buyers to gain a foothold in the market and can lead to more rental price gouging.

“Shadowy private-equity giants are buying up the housing supply in communities across New York, leaving everyday homeowners with nowhere to turn,” she said in a statement on Thursday. “I’m proposing new laws and policy changes to put the American dream of owning a home within reach for more New Yorkers than ever before.”

Cracking down on corporate landlords became a prominent talking point in last year’s presidential election. On the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris called on Congress to pass previously introduced legislation eliminating tax benefits for large investors that purchase large numbers of homes.

“It can make it impossible then for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home,” Ms. Harris said last summer.

In August, Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York, called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price gouging by private-equity firms in the housing market. He cited a study that estimated that private-equity firms “are expected to control 40 percent of the U.S. single-family rental market by 2030.”

Statehouses across the country have recently looked at ways to tackle corporate homeownership. One effort in Nevada, which passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, proposed capping the number of units a corporation could buy in a calendar year. It was opposed by local chambers of commerce and the state’s homebuilders association.

A bill was introduced in the Minnesota State Legislature that would ban the conversion of homes owned by corporations into rentals. It has yet to come up for a vote.

At the federal level, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, introduced joint legislation that would force hedge funds to sell all the single-family homes they own over 10 years.