City Council candidate Ritchie Torres is upset with us. In an editorial last week, we held up the 25-year-old Bronx Democrat as an example of a pol who will make the council even more liberal than it is now.
Our sin was to doubt that a man who campaigns on the basis that he grew up in public housing and now lives in low-income housing will be a force for reform. Some of Torres’ opponents in the primary had a more basic question: How the heck does a man who works as an aide to a city councilman even qualify for one of these coveted, subsidized apartments?
We don’t know whether Torres pulled any strings to land his apartment.
What we do know is this: He is a candidate who gives every sign of supporting — or expanding — the miserable status quo that consigns thousands of New Yorkers to life with second-class government institutions and programs.
We’re all for highlighting the struggles of low-income residents in public housing. In sharp contrast to Torres, however, we’d like to do it by giving these people opportunities to move up the economic ladder.
We could begin by ending subsidies for the rich in the form of rent control and rent stabilization that take half the city’s apartments off the market. That one reform would do more than anything to make housing more affordable for the communities Torres claims to champion. And yet, we haven’t heard a peep from him on that.
Nor, to our knowledge, has he stood up even for vouchers that would let low-income residents live in apartments of their own choosing instead of the government’s.
Plus, he’s been endorsed by the teachers unions. So will Ritchie Torres give low-income children now stuck in failing public schools the same shot at a decent education wealthier New Yorkers have by pushing alternatives such as charters?
There’s an agenda for a progressive New York just waiting to be pushed. But as we pointed out in that original editorial, we’re not likely to get it from a City Council filled with members such as Ritchie Torres.