From Court Street, to 5th Avenue, to Church Avenue, our main streets are suffering. It’s not just COVID. For small businesses across Brooklyn, we’ve had to deal with the pandemic of the monopolistic practices of Amazon, tax breaks that seem to always go to big, well-connected businesses, a lack of investment in vibrant public spaces, and eviction-ready landlords that care about their bottom lines — and not the culture of our neighborhoods.

I’m one of the founders of The Tank — an 18-year-old non-profit theater that has become a New York cultural institution, premiering more new work by emerging artists across disciplines than any other in the city. I know how it feels to have a landlord double the rent or be thrown out so developers can build luxury housing. And my wife Casey, a certified nurse midwife and birth educator, owns a small business — my family has personally experienced how the pandemic has decimated women-owned businesses.

Our main streets are more than our businesses. They are our community gathering spaces, our centers of neighborhood life. To thrive, we need open spaces and green spaces, parks and playgrounds, and pedestrian-centered visions including bike lanes and streets open for restaurants, retail, and culture.

We need to go big with a COVID relief plan for small businesses. But we also need smart policies that put small businesses first and fundamentally place public space at the heart of every neighborhood—where it belongs.

I’ve been fighting for full federal COVID relief at MoveOn and advocating for a real plan to support the arts in NYC. I want to invest in public spaces, in small businesses, in our restaurants and bars, in our theaters and culture—and create public spaces and good paying jobs that support all of these. This inherently requires a city that is friendly to pedestrians, accessible, affordable, and environmentally friendly. That’s a city that is ready to blossom post-pandemic.

Together, we can do this:

Together, we can:

• Invest in real covid relief for businesses including government backed loans to back payroll for struggling small businesses and nonprofits and programs that help new businesses, often blocked from start-up capital, from getting on their feet

• Use our organizing power and our platforms to advocate to state and federal entities for real relief—with direct payments and including undocummented workers

• Support Intro 1796, creating rent stabilization for commercial spaces so small businesses aren’t held hostage to changing demands from landlords while looking at ideas such as vacancy taxes and programs that provide legal support around contracting and evictions—all of which seek to shift more opportunity to tenants and give landlords incentives to work with renters

• Advocate for a “Bar Czar” to look after the unique challenges facing New York’s nightlife and hospitality industries and workers

• Support measures to take away the monopolistic advantage of Amazon and other online retailers, which has already put small businesses at a structural disadvantage

• Champion cooperative efforts to market, increase coordination among, and build collective power of our local retailers

Together, we can:

• Prioritize creating safe, livable, and complete streets through better design and enforcement.  This starts with a number of actions I’ve proposed for the 39th Council District, including making at least one regular and funded open street in each neighborhood, piloting a pedestrian-first zone modeled after successes in other dense cities, and making neighborhood bike networks that are safe for bikers from ages 8 to 80  

• Increase the expense budget and maintenance for our parks to keep them accessible, clean, maintained and programmed while ensuring every New Yorker has access to green space for active and passive recreation

• Integrate parks and open spaces fully into a holistic approach to neighborhood zoning and planning, and guarantee that every child lives within walking distance to a playground

• Rethink our approach to traffic enforcement, removing it from the NYPD, fully funding and expanding the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program, using existing technology to augment investigations into crashes, and decriminalizing minor pedestrian and cyclist infractions including jaywalking

• Work towards the vision laid out in Transportation Alternative’s 25x25 plan and reshape how we think about our streets as public spaces

Together we can:

• Give every New Yorker access to affordable live performance experiences in New York through school- and community-based programs and partnerships with presenters around the city

• Guarantee space committed to the arts in any new development and prioritize the inclusion of space for live music and performance

• Create a fund dedicated to supporting arts and cultural institutions—providing low-interest loans to cover moving costs and other capital expenses that many organizations currently don’t have access to

• Give more creators access to space to present in storefronts, streets, and public areas

• Provide legal counsel for arts organizations facing landlord negotiations where landlords traditionally have an upper hand and champion a program to provide mediation with landlords and arts tenants