UES-UWS Race For Congress: Patel, Nadler, Maloney Answer Our Questions

NEW YORK CITY — Manhattanites will head to the polls starting Saturday to vote in one of the strangest primary elections in recent memory: a three-way race between longtime incumbents Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, and challenger Suraj Patel.

The Democratic primary is taking place in the brand-new 12th Congressional District, which merged the Upper East Side, Upper West Side and Midtown into a single district as part of a court-ordered redrawing of New York's legislative maps.

Patel, an attorney and former White House aide, is seeking to unseat Nadler, who has represented a West Side-centered district since 1992, and Maloney, who has held her East Side seat since 1993.

In recent days, Patch interviewed all three leading contenders about hyper-local issues from crime to congestion pricing to a controversial subway elevator — revealing differences in their neighborhood priorities and claims of "voodoo solutions" directed at the two incumbents. (Patch was unable to reach a fourth candidate, Ashmi Sheth.)

Here's what we heard from Jerry Nadler, Carolyn Maloney and Suraj Patel (answers have been edited for brevity):

Can you name a project that you’d want to fund in a part of the district that you haven’t previously run in or represented?

MALONEY: They have talked to me about a number of projects [in] Hell’s Kitchen. They’re interested in having the cruise ships electrified in that area as they’ve done in California, that’s one thing.

There is a subway line that they have talked about. And they’ve talked about an area where they would like the road to go underneath and have a park on top of it.

Also, I would say, Jerry’s tunnel — the rail freight tunnel [between New Jersey and Brooklyn] — he keeps talking about that. When we went to Congress he wanted to build the rail freight tunnel, I wanted to build the Second Avenue Subway. I built the Second Avenue Subway and we’re now going up to 125th Street, the first leg of it. So I could pick up his rail freight tunnel and actually get it done.

PATEL: Two major things come to mind at the top. Since 2002, a budget that was passed by Bush Republicans cut NYCHA’s annual funding by $3 billion dollars a year. In 2009 and this year, we have ample budget times to restore that capital funding allocation to repair NYCHA and reform it and give people more local control.

Second is subways. The Penn Station redevelopment project needs to not just be a cosmetic makeover but a fundamental upgrade of tunnels, tracks, and increasing of capacity for what is the biggest rail terminal in the Western Hemisphere. Anyone who’s ever been down there knows that it’s utterly overcrowded, dangerous, miserable, in many ways.

NADLER: Second Avenue Subway. It’s a very important project for mobility, not just for East Siders but for the connectivity of the subway system to go to certain areas they couldn’t otherwise access.

Amid the uptick in crime in NYC, some politicians including Mayor Adams are calling on the state to roll back its 2019 bail reform law. Do you agree that it should be rolled back, or are there better ways to reduce crime?

NADLER: Absolutely not. I don’t think it goes far enough. The fact of the matter is, crime is going up all over the country, it’s going up in New York, rural areas, urban areas, all over the country, and they don’t have bail reform there, so that’s a red herring.

My feeling is very simple: you have to keep dangerous people, people who pose a danger to the public before trial, in jail. It should never be dependent on money. The judge should have total discretion based on everything they know about the person in front of them, to keep them in jail, if they think that serves the safety of the public, but there should be no cash bail required whatsoever.

MALONEY: I think judges need to consider alternatives to incarceration when determining a person’s pretrial status. I think that how dangerous a defendant might be, we should add that clause and allow judicial discretion for judges.

PATEL: I was a proud supporter of bail reform and I still am. I do not believe we should criminalize poverty, I don’t think that the ability to pay cash should have much of an impact on whether you are allowed to be free while you’re innocent until proven guilty.

At the same time, though, I clearly acknowledge that there are instances in which judges need discretion, when a person who has been a multiple-time recidivist or on particularly violent issues needs to be held. ... So yeah, I support common-sense reform of the bail law but I do not support going back to a fully cash bail system that criminalizes poverty.

New York is in the midst of a dire housing shortage — is there any part of the 12th District that you’d support “upzoning” in order to build more housing?

PATEL: Midtown East is a high-opportunity neighborhood for rezoning and upzoning. And frankly, given that we’re at a 60 percent office vacancy rate right now, perhaps we should start to face the music that some of these offices may never come fully, fully back.

There are opportunities across the city, in Manhattan particularly, to rezone with multilayer zoning. If you go to Paris or Amsterdam you see commercial, residential all mixed together where people don’t have to take the subway, can live in the neighborhood they work in. We have ample opportunity to do that across the city.

Though it’s now out of the district, Maloney and Nadler were both incredibly opposed to the SoHo rezoning, which added an incredible number of affordable housing units and mixed-use zoning.

NADLER: We need to look at that. I think upzoning is a good idea in general, but [for] specifics, you have to look at the various neighborhoods and what’s going on. I can’t comment off the top of my head on that.

MALONEY: In terms of housing, I’m the only [candidate] that has built seven senior housing residence buildings in my district.

I still support neighborhoods’ ability to defend historic districts and buildings. We have historic buildings and districts and historic preservation of our city is still an important goal for many of my constituents. ... Zoning is something that is on the local level and I think the thing that we can do is increase the vacancy tax — why would anybody have buildings that they’re not renting?

I am told by people in real estate that there’s so much commercial [property] now they can’t rent it. So I would look at taking that commercial and reverting that into residential — that would help the crisis.

There’s been controversy over the MTA’s plan to build a new elevator at the 68th Street-Hunter College station. The MTA plans to build it on the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue, in front of the Imperial House apartment complex, but Imperial House residents want the elevator on the southeast corner, which was the MTA's original plan. Where do you stand?

MALONEY: I don’t think it’s an issue now. They’ve started building it. It’s over. They’ve started building it, next question.

[Patch followed up to ask which corner Maloney preferred, since Imperial House residents had claimed in June that Maloney agreed with them about moving the elevator back to the southeast corner.]

There was information that it would’ve been more cost-effective and better at a different location, I raised that, and [the MTA] decided they were going forward with it. I did not support delaying the elevator being built.

PATEL: [It is] unbelievable that we have reached a level of NIMBYism in this city where elected officials feel comfortable going out there to oppose an elevator access in New York City. I think it is craven, frankly, to take the political position that we don’t want to support an elevator because it might inconvenience my walk by a sidewalk.

I don’t actually know … why the MTA chose the initial location other than perhaps because it’s at the convenient corner for people to get up and walk up Lex or down Lex, which to me is extremely sensible.

[Patch did not have time to ask Nadler this question]

Congestion pricing is expected to impose a toll on anyone driving below 60th Street — do you support it, and would you push for an exemption for residents who live in the borough?

NADLER: I certainly support congestion pricing, I always have. It is vital to the financing of our mass transit system, it is also vital to cutting down on cars, which means cutting down on emissions, which means cutting down on asthma, which means cutting down on carbon to the atmosphere. It is very good for climate change, so I certainly support congestion pricing.

Now, there certainly ought to be some exceptions, and there is an advisory board looking at that, which is expected to come out with recommendations for exemptions shortly.

MALONEY: Yes, I support it completely, but the London plan is people that live there are exempted. Living below 60th Street in the zone would be exempted. It seems pretty hard to charge someone on a low income to ride in and out of their zone.

PATEL: For it. [But] the fact of the matter is, we have people who live in Manhattan who may work in a distribution center in Maspeth or the reverse. Given the state of our subway system and lack of any new rail lines for years, I do understand that some people need a car to make this city run, to make a living. I’d be open to looking at saying, congestion pricing except for special permitted residents of this inter-borough transit.

Midtown is still in a state of limbo, with many offices sitting empty and transit ridership below pre-pandemic levels. How would you help revitalize it?

PATEL: We’ve got to get our offices reopened, we’ve got to end the pandemic once and for all and I think we’re on the verge of that. Anyone who gives you a short-term answer is lying to you. Anyone who gives you an answer like Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney did, about how we should convert Midtown office towers to residential, doesn’t understand residential-commercial construction or the economy at large. It’s not that easy.

My plan, “The Dynamic Society,” calls for a federal investment in research and development to start to look at the clean energy technologies and future medical cures that we are currently underfunding. … To make the city more resilient overall, you’ve got to diversify its economy and stop telling people voodoo solutions that we know aren’t going to work.

NADLER: The basic problem is that people fled because of COVID. The population of the city has basically recovered, but people got used to working at home. I’m not sure you’re ever going to see people come to work 9 to 5 every day anymore, and I think a lot of the people will prefer to work at home part-time, all of the time, and that’s going to reduce the demand for office space, which is very bad for the city’s tax base. I think the answer to that, and to other problems, is to convert a lot of that office space into housing.

That will help with the housing shortage, brings down the price of housing, and enables us to utilize the buildings that are already built.

MALONEY: Midtown is usually a very exciting and busy place. I don’t know, we could have more fairs down there, more activities down there to bring people there. We could work with the mayor’s office, or the tourism office to figure out events and things that we could do.

And we could look at housing for old offices. If there are vacancies there in Midtown and it seems to be not booming back, I’m guessing it’s because the commercial spaces are not filling up. So we should look at taking those commercial spaces and turning them into housing for people.

Federal COVID relief funds are drying up and some fear we may be entering a recession — what’s one area where we should cut spending in NYC, at the city, state or federal level?

MALONEY: If someone is corrupt or doing a bad job then it should be managed well. But I fought very hard to get money back to New York — when Mayor de Blasio was saying [during the pandemic] he was going to be cutting teachers and hospital workers and municipal workers and transit workers, along with many other people I worked like crazy to get an American Rescue Plan that brought money to our city.

I guess on the City Council, they can decide where they want to cut. But it’s my job to bring money to the city and I’ve been great at it.

PATEL: We’ve got to get a wholesale reform of the red tape and bureaucracy in New York City to be better stewards of people’s tax dollars. It cannot be that it costs, from the side of the MTA, almost 12 times that of Paris which has stronger labor regulations than the United States does.

Before we’re asking more of people’s hard-earned tax dollars, let’s make sure we’re spending them wisely.

NADLER: I don’t know why we have to cut spending. In fact, I don’t think we should cut spending — I think that government doesn’t spend enough. One thing we should do is increase taxes on the rich for a number of reasons. Number one, it finances government services, number two, it reduces inflation by reducing the demand side of the equation. So, increasing taxes on the rich is both good for anti-inflation and enables government to support services to the people.

You’ve already been asked whether Biden should run again in 2024. But if he decides not to run again, who do you think should run?

NADLER: There are a lot of good candidates. I would probably support the same person I supported for the nomination in 2020, which is Elizabeth Warren. It should go without saying that I support President Biden, I think he’s done an excellent job, and I hope he does run for reelection.

MALONEY: If he runs I will be supporting President Biden. But before we get to 2024 politics, let’s get through the 2022 election first.

PATEL: I’m not going to answer that question because we don’t know who they are. I have no clue who the potential candidates would be.

Right now, I have cast my lot with Joseph Robinette Biden because he is the leader of the party, and frankly, marshaling through a Congress that is recalcitrant some of the biggest moves we’ve seen in decades on infrastructure, on climate change, on fairer taxation of corporations. So why make the switch right now?

Early voting runs from Aug. 13-21 for this month's primary, followed by Election Day on Aug. 23.

Besides Congress, races for State Senate will also be on the ballot. New York's chaotic redistricting process resulted in two different primary elections this summer, with races for State Assembly and statewide offices being held in June.

Find your poll site and view a sample ballot here.