![]() I mean, it’s hard to say what are the three items because there’s so much need. What would you say are the top three issues specific to this district that you plan to tackle? There’s such a great need for housing for low and moderate income New Yorkers, so why aren’t we building it? It’s always on the tongue of anybody running for office, and yet they’re just press conferences. Virginia Fields was the Manhattan Borough President, and then Scott Stringer, and Eric Adams and Marty Markowitz, just to educate myself on how all these elected officials talk about affordable housing and yet, they really don’t do anything about affordable housing. I attended every affordable housing task force meeting from when C. That was really my first introduction into working in government and working with the city and legislature. That helped the subsidized people at the other end of the spectrum, so you were helping to subsidize people in the building. If you came in at this higher level, you would actually pay more. The nice thing about the bill is that in this new area of the new margin that it extended (it increased the income eligibility by 25%) it left the other end of the spectrum where it was, at the same level. It increased income limits to be more in line with city workers. That email became a piece of legislation that in 2013 got signed into law by Governor Cuomo. I had sent them an email, with bullet points about the issues: affordable housing, Mitchell-Lama, and where we are. ![]() I spoke to the city council and then I went to meet with my local elected officials – my state senator, my state assembly member. I met with these state legislators and representatives of New York State Senate. It took me a while to put all the people in place that needed to be talked to. I started reaching out to elected officials to say “Hey, this is our responsibility to provide affordable housing to moderate income New Yorkers, and yet this doesn’t reach that metric.” Nobody had any answers, except everybody agreed with me that yeah, it’s not right, but no one was doing anything. I’m the beneficiary of one of the greatest affordable housing programs in the history of New York called Mitchell-Lama, and yet when I became president of my Mitchell-Lama in 2005, I saw that income levels did not match middle income or working class incomes for city workers and teachers or nurses. For the past 16 of those years, I’ve been very involved in our community as an advocate, as an organizer, and in some instances as an activist. I’ve been living in Brooklyn Heights for 36 years. Potosky cut his political teeth as a housing activist, and it’s the flagship issue of his campaign. We spoke with the District 33 candidate about his love of parks, animals, and small business recovery.įor our readers who might not know you, can you give us a quick introduction? What motivated you to run in the first place? Now he’s hoping to add “ city council member” to his extensive resume. While Toba Potosky is, in his own words, decidedly not a career politician, he’s had pretty much every other job – street vendor, documentarian, Studio 54 bartender, to name a few.
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