Marte Outlines 3 ‘Pillars’: No More 24; No More Medicare Advantage; No More Luxury Housing

NYC Council Member Chris Marte with a “No More 24” supporter during the June 6 rally and march. Photos/Steve Wishnia

By Steve Wishnia 

Chants of “No More 24” and “Vote for Marte” alternated on the corner of Clinton and Grand streets on the Lower East Side June 6, as a few hundred people gathered for a rally and march supporting the re-election of City Councilmember Christopher Marte.

“Councilmember Marte has stood up for us,” former home health-care attendant Yun Fang Zhang told the crowd, speaking in Chinese through an interpreter. “No màs 24 horas,” urged Lydia Gotay, who said her 20 years of working 24-hour shifts “destroyed my health.”

Marte, speaking as the march ended at Kimlau Square, said the three pillars of his campaign are ending 24-hour shifts for home health attendants (who are paid for only 13 of those hours); protecting the health care of retired city workers from being switched to Medicare Advantage; and “stopping real estate from taking over our community” with luxury development.

The first two of those are contained in bills Marte has sponsored in the Council. Intro 615 would limit home attendants’ shifts to 12 hours except in emergencies, and Intro 1096 would require the city to offer retirees traditional Medicare plus a supplemental plan without charging them premiums.

Neither measure has received a hearing since they were introduced last October. Intro 615 has only 13 cosponsors, plus Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Intro 1096 has 16 cosponsors.

The cosponsors of the bill to end 24-hour shifts are mostly left-leaning Councilmembers, although they include Bronx Republican Kristy Marmorato and conservative Queens Democrat Robert Holden. The Medicare measure’s cosponsors range from socialists to centrist and liberal Democrats to the Council’s most flamboyant Trump followers.

‘No More 24’ advocates march on the Lower East Side for Council Member Chris Marte’s re-election.

“It’s a bipartisan issue,” Marte told Work-Bites during the march. “Workers’ rights and worker protections, so people can work in dignity and retire in dignity.”

There are “a lot of special interests” opposed to both bills, he says. But he’s encouraged that Brooklyn Democrat Justin Brannan, now running for comptroller, recently signed on to the Medicare bill, as did Erik Bottcher of Chelsea, increasing the odds that it will get a hearing.

Marte says the figures people use to argue that ending 24-hour shifts would cost too much are “inaccurate.” People found a way to make it work in Rochester, in Buffalo, and on Long Island, he adds. “I think we can make it work in New York City.”

“It costs money to pay people for every hour they work,” he concludes.

“These are moral issues,” says Michelle Keller, a District Council 37 retiree who worked for 44 years at the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Marte, she added, “is carrying it,” while Democrats who won’t support the two measures “are supposed to be progressives, but they’ve lost their way.”

The primary heats up

In the June 24 Democratic primary, Marte faces significant opposition from Tribeca lawyer Jess Coleman and former police counterterrorism-policy head Elizabeth Lewinsohn, who is running a mostly self-financed campaign and has been endorsed by the UFT.

All three say housing affordability is a major issue, but Coleman and Lewinsohn take a more “yes in my back yard” approach. They both say that Stellar Management and Vornado’s plans to build a 940-foot luxury tower at Independence Plaza North, a former Mitchell-Lama middle-income development in Tribeca, will add to the neighborhood’s housing supply, but call for more “transparency” about how many affordable units it will contain.

Marte, in contrast, was the only Manhattan Councilmember to vote against Mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” plan last December. Instead of requiring more affordable units in apartments built under the plan’s relaxed zoning regulations, he objected, it said that developers only had to include below-market apartments if they chose to build higher and denser than zoning regulations allow. (In a 120-unit building that got 20 “affordable” apartments from that option, only four would have rents low enough for a family of three that makes $58,300 a year.) He worked to block the proposed four-tower Two Bridges luxury development on the Chinatown waterfront, although it would have contained some below-market units, and told the Tribeca Citizen that the Independence Plaza North tower would “drive up rent” and “spread speculation.”

His critics have spun that as “Marte opposes building affordable housing,” a woman who is canvassing for him told Work-Bites.