Mayor’s address calls for “honest conversations” but buries issues affecting the financially distressed  and marginalized.

In his final  State of the City Address on Thursday, March 9, Mayor Noam Bramson declared victory after a decade of explosive real-estate development that has transformed New Rochelle’s downtown and dominated the city’s politics.  “The debates that consumed us for decades are largely settled,” he declared.  “Transit-oriented development is the right strategy.” 

Claiming that New Rochelle has arrived at a “golden hour in which all things seem possible,” the departing  mayor recited a litany of carefully curated statistics about projects approved and completed, new housing units per capita, construction jobs filled, and projected growth in population, sales, and tax revenue.  “People of all ages and incomes and interests want to be here,” he said.

But can all the people who want to be here, including those whose families have lived here for generations, afford to be here? 

Speaking before a largely supportive audience including many local politicians and government officials, Bramson declared, as he has in the past, New Rochelle’s “unshakeable commitment to inclusion and equity.”  But he failed to address many of the issues that have aroused concerns among the city’s Black, brown, and working class/other marginalized communities.

He spoke of job  training programs and local hiring, but failed to state that the goals, as codified in the city’s Economic Opportunity and Non-Discrimination Policy, are only aspirational and not required, and as a result, these programs have consistently failed to meet promised targets.

He touted the LINC as a “bold and transformative vision,” but did not mention the plan’s failure to remediate any of the losses of Black homes and businesses destroyed in the construction of Memorial Highway and I-95 in the 1960s.

He spoke of the city’s commitment to “advance climate justice in areas affected historically by redlining,” but did not discuss the city’s approval of a Starbucks drive-thru adjacent to Bracey Houses at Echo and Huguenot, endangering the health of hundreds of children and elderly residents.

He touted the construction of the new Remington Boys and Girls Club, without mention of the lack of city funding for its operations.

He credited the New Rochelle Police Department’s “dedication and professionalism” for a low crime rate and for “engagement in a collaborative process of public safety reform,” but did not mention the delayed and secretive process for developing a promised Civilian Complaint Review Board or the continuing cover-up surrounding the police killing of Kamal Flowers in 2020.

On housing, he claimed credit for the approval of 1200 new “below-market” apartments, new requirements for “deeper affordability,” and recently increased incentives “to include affordable units within market-rate projects” rather than “off-site”—only obliquely acknowledging that many of the city’s “below-market” apartments are not truly affordable and that the city encouraged RXR, the master developer, to segregate its “affordable” units in 11 Garden Street, in a high-pollution area adjacent to I-95.  He did not address the statements of many long-time New Rochelle residents that they can no longer afford to live here.

And he did not address the future of the Bracey Houses, the city’s last public housing development, which is threatened by surrounding private development, or the recent purge of the Directors of the Municipal Housing Authority, who were working on a development plan for Bracey based on human needs rather than private investment. 

With soaring rhetoric about “rejecting hatred and bigotry in all its forms,” “celebrating our diversity,” seeking to “repair what is broken, to heal what is wounded, to lift our reality until it reaches the height of our ideals,” the Mayor acknowledged that “stark inequalities still exist here in our community, not as historic artifacts but as real and present obstacles to the life prospects of countless neighbors,” and called for commitments to “have honest conversations about the persistence of privilege and injustice” to “accept our responsibility, individual and collective, to right wrongs,” and to see that “physical and economic progress…will be matched by equal dedication to social and human progress.”

Was the Mayor’s speech part of an “honest conversation”?  Or was it an attempt to whitewash a record that has served to perpetuate and deepen structural inequality and racism?  And will the next city administration continue along the same path or start to truly “repair what is broken” and right the wrongs of the distant and recent past?