Getting Government Under Comptrol

A revealing conversation about power, politics and the future of New York City with Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. We dive deep into his campaign for city comptroller — an office responsible for managing $280 billion in pension funds, overseeing city contracts and providing crucial checks on mayoral power — and his vision for leveraging the office's substantial powers to tackle New York's affordability crisis. With Manhattan rents rising to an average of $5,300 monthly and vacancy rates at historic lows, Levine reveals his strategy to finance desperately needed affordable housing through pension fund investments. Plus, he makes the case for universal childcare as a $2 billion investment that could transform family economics across the five boroughs.

You can listen to this episode, “Getting Government Under Comptrol,” on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Jamie: You are listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City Podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin.

Molly: Is that Patrick Ewing? Behind you? 

Jamie: It is Patrick Ewing, Knicks all star, legendary center. You wanna know why he's here? 

Molly: I do. 

Jamie: When I started my new job — not night shift, but my actual job job — since I was going to be managing people and having new partners, I figured I have learned enough about myself to know that I have some very minor flaws and, um…and….

You're supposed to say, “No, you don’t.”

Molly: I would if I could, but I can't. 

Jamie: There we go. So I found myself an executive coach and I said, “Okay, here's my deal. I'm starting a new job. I need to make sure I don't go in and destroy all my relationships before I get started.” One of the things he said to me was: put three things in your office. Something that reflects your personal values, something that is a family thing, and something that reflects personality or other interests or something like that. 

So I put my family—I’ve got pictures of my family all over the place. For my personal values, I have a bunch of things about government work that I've done, and I figure that's sort of sufficient to show people that I care about public interest or whatever.

Molly: Or whatever.

Jamie: And then Patrick Ewing. I was like, I'm a Knicks fan. I have some interests that don’t require me to work all the time. 

Molly: Oh, so this is just to prove that you're a human who exists outside of the office. 

Jamie: Correct. 

Molly: But you are a Knicks fan.

Jamie: Yeah, I didn't have to make it up. 

Molly: I mean, that would be sad if you had to make up your Knicks fandom just to seem human.

Jamie: No, it’s conveniently true. A byproduct of it is Patrick was part of the ‘90s Knicks teams that were super enforcers. They were mean and nasty and they were vicious defenders. They were just rough, and he was kind of the leader of that. So arguably I'm sending people a signal by having him up there. 

Molly: That you're vicious and rough.

Jamie: I just said I can be unpleasant. 

Molly: I don't think you need Patrick to show that. But tell me about your Knicks fandom. Where did this come from? 

Jamie: I grew up in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, basically. 

Molly: Yeah. We know you're old. We got it. 

Jamie: I'm super old and I was a Knicks fan that whole time. I was also a Yankees fan, but I was a big Knicks fan because they were —

Molly: Wait, I thought you were a Mets fan now.

Jamie: Nope, no Mets. 

Molly: Whoa. Okay. This is over. I'm out. I'm speechless.

But all right, so we're Knicks fans.

Jamie: Avidly following the Knicks. It's great. They're going to go to the playoffs this year. It's just fun. It's fun to go to the Knicks games. And you see a lot of people. You see Spike Lee. Years ago I saw somebody fall into Mike Bloomberg. That was pretty funny. 

Molly: Oh. 

Jamie: I've never seen Eric Adams at a game, which I just don't understand. It's yet another example of how he's not figured out how to do the easy things. Just go to a Knicks game. Everybody loves the Knicks these days. 

Molly: It's true. They’re not divisive like the Mets or the Yankees. There's just the Knicks. 

Jamie: I think he's probably afraid he'd be booed, to be honest … well, he might be. That's usually why politicians don't go to things like that.

Molly: Yeah. 

Jamie: Yep. But nobody would boo the comptrollers. 

Molly: Oh. Nice pivot. 

Jamie: Mm-hmm. Nobody boos a comptroller. 

Molly: For most people, I don't think comptroller means very much. 

Jamie: No, it doesn't. 

Molly: Why does it matter? 

Jamie: It's this very interesting job. He's got a very important job in the governance of New York City.

He's supposed to stand for fiscal responsibility, but also policymaking, and he's in charge of the future wellbeing of millions of New York City retirees from the public sector, which is obviously very, very important. 

Molly: Is that why we're talking to Mark Levine?

Jamie: It is. He's a candidate for New York City comptroller. He is the borough president of Manhattan. He's a long time city councilman and he's an interesting guy to talk to. 

Molly: Let the games begin.

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Jamie: Mark, thanks for being here. 

Mark: Thank you, Jamie. Thrilled to be here. 

Jamie: Excellent. Why don't we start by talking about who you are and what your background is. We can talk about what you're doing here specifically after that, but how about how you got here? 

Mark: A windy route. I actually majored in physics in college. That was the plan. By the time I graduated, I decided I didn't want to live in a lab and I wanted to be out in the world having an impact. And I became a science teacher in the South Bronx at a junior high school. I actually taught bilingual math and science.

Jamie: This was not a gifted and talented school. It was a public school. 

Mark: It was a neighborhood high school in the early ‘90s. There were definitely gifted and talented kids in the school, and kids who were really struggling. The whole range.

Almost without fail, the families were pretty disconnected from the formal financial system, relying really on loan sharks and pawn shops and check cashing stores for their banking services, if you will. And I decided to do something about it.

I started a nonprofit based in Uptown Manhattan and Washington Heights that opened a community development credit union, basically a nonprofit bank. It's called Neighborhood Trust. It's still going strong on 166th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. 

Jamie: I think I met you for the first time when you were still running the credit union. 

Mark: That is when we met. Right? 

Jamie: Yeah, exactly. So it was like early, early ‘90s. What does a non-profit credit union look like when you start up? 

Mark: We got a hold of an old abandoned bank branch. Chase had closed a branch on 179th and Fort Washington. It had been empty for five years, so it was in bad shape. But they said, “Don't worry, we have a branch that we're just closing now in the Bronx, and if you can go there in the next 24 hours, anything you can take out is yours.” We rented a truck, got a bunch of buddies with tools, and we took out all the furniture. We unscrewed all the bulletproof glass, which would've cost us a fortune. We packed all the money-counting machines and all of that.

We took everything to this abandoned facility on Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights, and we were able to open up in 1997 in what felt like a bank branch. 

But it was cooperatively owned by the members. So when residents of the community came in, they became shareholders and they voted for the board of directors. If there were any extra earnings in the institution, it was returned to them as dividends. It's a very empowering model, and I'm really proud that this credit union, Neighborhood Trust, is still going strong. Over the years, it’s made $100 million dollars of small loans, helping people do everything from buying a home computer to paying for education to starting a small business to getting a mortgage. The repayment rate has been something like 98%. 

What's really just blossomed over the years is a financial literacy education program — teaching people how to manage a checking account, how to save for retirement, how to apply for a mortgage, all in English and Spanish. 

It’s something that I'm thinking a lot about. As I'm running for an office related to this work, I want to take this citywide. I want every young person and every adult to have access to these kinds of educational services. 

Jamie: How many people do they educate a year?

Mark: Tens of thousands. 

Jamie: Really? That’s remarkable. And you can see the results, in lack of loan losses, for example?

Mark: It helps the credit union in its financial services, because people are going to be less likely to bounce a check, more likely to make their loan payments and more likely to succeed if they borrow to start a small business. But more importantly, it helps people in their personal lives to avoid bankruptcy and develop a credit history.

Financial literacy is underappreciated in being absolutely key to getting ahead in life, and we're not helping the next generation of New Yorkers acquire these skills. Something we did at the credit union: we had school banking where we would go into local elementary and middle schools and open no-fee, no-minimum savings accounts, and then have a teller there once a week.

Jamie: For the students? 

Mark: Yeah, for the kids. They would bring in $1.75 a week or whatever, but over the year they could save maybe a hundred, couple hundred bucks. We would pay interest and they would learn about how to calculate the interest and how to read a statement.

For some of them, the parents didn't have accounts. So then the parents would see that the kids had accounts and they would come in and open one. Why don’t we do this in schools all over New York City today? 

Jamie: That's remarkable. So you fast forward: you ran the credit union. You and I met when you wanted to run for office, and I told you you were crazy.

Mark: Yep. 

Jamie: You tried how many times before you actually got in? 

Mark: I lost twice spectacularly before finally winning in 2013. 

Jamie: Right. A city council seat. 

Mark: Yes. Chair of the Parks Committee one term. I'm really passionate about green space and fighting for more equity in the park system. I chaired the Health Committee my second term, when we were hit by the pandemic.

Based on my work in the council, I was very lucky to win borough-wide in 2021 and now serve as the Manhattan Borough President, where I have really made affordability and housing my number one priority. 

Jamie: Let's play a game: most and least important jobs in New York City government.

What's the most important job? 

Mark: Elected job? 

Jamie: Yeah. 

Mark: Can you compete with the mayor? 

Jamie: No, I'm not sure. 

Mark: Okay. So the mayor, but the comptroller is the second most important job. 

Jamie: What’s the least important job? 

Mark: I don't want to get any of my colleagues hating me, Jamie, come on man. 

Jamie: I was looking for borough president.

Mark: No, no, no. It's a great gig. 

Jamie: Okay. Give me one sentence as to why it's a great gig. 

Mark: Well, real power over land use. 

Jamie: Okay. 

Mark: The question of what you can build and where is the existential question of New York City today, right? And I've put my all into leveraging those powers to try and address our housing shortage.

It's also a pretty big bully pulpit as well. I learned this when I took office in 2022 and Putin was invading Ukraine. 

Jamie: Oh, I remember Putin called you out specifically? 

Mark: Not quite, but I did call for seizure of the oligarchs’ apartments in Manhattan, where they're parking money for asset protection purposes.

And it went global. Jamie, I was getting called by the BBC and then Al Jazeera. None of them knew or particularly cared that the Manhattan Borough President has no power at all to actually implement that policy. Doesn't matter. They didn't care because I had a good title and I was calling for something bold. I learned that one of the most important powers of the job is to move the narrative on policy, and it’s something I've really tried to do on housing. 

Jamie: You've been running for office off and on and winning sometimes, losing sometimes for 25 years, basically. And I would not have said at the beginning that you were a politician.

The fact that you thought to call for the seizure knowing full well that you have no power to implement the seizure means to me that you learned something about politics. 

Mark: I can't tell if this is a compliment or not.

Jamie: I think politics is important. How do you execute your policies if you're not in politics?

What would you say is one thing you've learned about politics?

Mark: I think the most important currency in politics is that people want to be seen. 

That's true when you're talking to them one-on-one. It's also true if you're doing public speaking. People want to know that you understand who you're talking to, what they care about, what their concerns and priorities are.

Jamie: To me, that sounds exactly right, and it's consistent with what you hear about on the national level. When people start with these autopsies of the Democratic party, a lot of that is what keeps coming back. 

Okay, so now you’re running for city comptroller. It's a little amorphous [as a job] in the sense that it's got several different pieces to it. Break it into a couple of pieces for people who don't know. 

Mark: This is not a ceremonial job. It's the custodian of the city's pension funds, which amounts to a pretty mind blowing number: $280 billion. That's our money. It's not a small piece of the American economy, and it can be used, I think, more productively to advance goals within the five boroughs of New York City.

The comptroller also manages the city's debt and has to review and certify all contracts — the city procures $40 billion in private contracts every year, and all that runs through the comptroller's office. The office also oversees tort claims, so if you sue the city because you've been harmed, that’s actually adjudicated out of the comptroller's office. 

Jamie: That can't be where it's tried?

Mark: Well, ideally it doesn't go to trial. The idea is that before you're allowed to sue the city, you have to go through a claims process.

Jamie: Ah, I didn't know that. 

Mark: It's different from suing a private corporation. The comptroller also manages enforcement of wage laws. And then there is oversight investigations, auditing and, if necessary, subpoena power over the mayor and every city agency. It really is the job of the comptroller to be a check on the mayor, to hold the mayor accountable, to hold every city agency accountable. The comptroller can also move a broader agenda because of all those levers. Jamie: Do you believe the job is in part to partner with the mayor?

Mark: I think the job is to be independent of the mayor so that you support the mayor when he or she is doing the right thing. You don't want to be permanently oppositional, but you also need to be able to push back right when the mayor needs to be called out.

Jamie: Of the mayoral candidates, I'm gonna list—

Mark: You know I'm not going to endorse on this podcast. 

Jamie: I'm not asking for endorsement, no, but what I wanna know is, of the mayoral candidates that I'll list: do you have a relationship with them, and if so, why?

Okay. Jessica Ramos. 

Mark: As a colleague in government today, yeah.

Jamie: Okay. I'm looking for independents. Zellnor Myrie. 

Mark: Same — I'm friends with most of the people who are running. 

Jamie: Oh, you're friends with everybody, but that’s because you’re a politician.

Mark: Well, I'm a nice guy. (laughs)

Jamie: The Mark Levine I used to know would have had enemies everywhere. Okay. So you're friends with everybody so far? Zohran Mamdani.

Mark: I know him the least of those who are running, probably, and certainly have some policy differences with him, but I’ve run into him through my policy work.

Jamie: And Andrew Cuomo. 

Mark: When he was governor, I was a city council member, so I was a little too junior to interact a lot with him directly. But I served in government at the same time and I've certainly watched his career very closely.

Jamie: It's interesting, you and Andrew are probably the two people that I would have most closely associated with Covid response. You were very outspoken on the meaning of the data that we were seeing.

Mark: At that point, I had been Chair of the Health Committee for two years, so I felt I had good relationships deep in the health department and among epidemiologists and in hospital ERs, because I've been doing the work. I had people that I trusted and, maybe just as importantly, who trusted me.

When shit started to really get bad, I had trusted conversations with people and I knew when they were scared that it was time to sound the alarm. 

And look, I took a lot of hits from the right for that — still do to some extent. 

Jamie: Because of the idea of closure, basically. 

Mark: All of it: closure and testing and vaccination.

Jamie: Let's talk about the nursing homes. For Andrew, this is one of his three or four big issues that he has to overcome if he's going to be elected mayor. They call it a nursing home scandal, but it's his approach to nursing homes during Covid.

I was talking to a friend of mine who was from Italy the other day. He said, “Why is he getting blamed for this? This is what Europe did basically. They took people out and they put the old people back in the nursing homes.”

They got very sick. But wasn't out of line with what was being done elsewhere. I don’t know if that's true or not. Do you have a view about what the right thing to have done would've been? 

Mark: I was so focused on city government, and this was a state government issue that certainly at the time I was not in deep. I heard the alarms being raised, but the hospital system was in bad shape at the time, I'll say that.

The hospital system was running out of capacity, and essentially every hospital bed in New York City needed to be turned into a COVID ICU bed. 

Jamie: I wasn't in the government at the time, obviously. I was watching it like everybody else. I don't know that I had a view then. I don't even know that I have a view now, but I agree with you.

It's very hard to make very difficult decisions like that, particularly under that kind of pressure. I don't really know why he would've made a decision like that for any reason other than to try to save lives. It is always the aftermath that turns worse. But in that case, I don't know.

I think you're basically right. Just to finish off on public health for a second. It doesn't really get talked about much on the campaign trail, which is sort of odd to me. We're four years after a major public health crisis.

And I think we would all agree that the federal government is not better prepared to deal with a major public health crisis. Do you have a sense of what that means for the city?

Mark:  I'm really worried about this. And I was wrong. I thought that COVID would permanently change how the public thought about public health. After 9/11, national security became anti-terrorism — became this permanent institution, in excess in some ways. 

I thought that would happen with public health after COVID. And it didn't. In some ways, we're weaker than we were, because public health has been more politicized. And that's before a figure of the caliber of RFK Jr. became HHS Secretary. I am really worried about our capacity to deal with the next crisis. The tough year we're having on measles is just a tiny indication of what's at risk. By the way, vaccination rates for measles are down in New York City as well.

The way you measured measles vaccinations is based on how many two year olds have had their first dose. We're now down. Now it's 81% for two year olds. This is nothing like what's happening in Texas, and not connected to that outbreak. But most of the disease control work of the city and all the disease surveillance is funded by the feds. So we need to start gaming out what happens if that's cut, and it might be cut.

Jamie: We agree that this is really worrisome. Back to something that's maybe slightly more in our control, and more top of mind for the people that are going to elect you: affordability. Everybody talks about affordability. You talk about affordability probably more than most. What does that mean to you? Affordability of what? 

Mark: Well, housing, first and foremost. Childcare number two. But really it's about the crisis of housing affordability. With average rents in Manhattan that, as of this month's report, are over $5,300 a month for a market rate apartment. 

We are way beyond just pricing out low wage workers. Now we're pricing out bus drivers and social workers and nurses and teachers, certainly from Manhattan and increasingly from the outer boroughs.

We have to build more affordable housing. We probably need half a million units in New York City. We have a long way to go, or it's going to be impossible for the next generation of young people to find housing here — with terrible consequences for our population, for our workforce, for economic development and for homelessness.

Jamie: There doesn't seem to be any disagreement about the fact that we're short on housing and that rent is too high as a result. 

Mark: Well, there's definitely disagreement that we have a housing supply shortage. 

Jamie: Explain. Who do you hear it from? Constituents or your colleagues who are elected officials? 

Mark: Both. There are people who say, “There are vacant apartments, right. Why don’t we just fill those?”

Jamie: We get that at NYCHA, too: “You have 4,000 vacancies. How come you have 4,000 vacancies?” Well, we have 172,000 apartments. And of those, 4,000 are basically vacant because they're inundated with lead paint or asbestos or both. So you tell me what you'd like us to do with people in those apartments. I hear you.

It's hard to argue when people see vacancies. For those folks, I assume the remedy of choice is to keep rents controlled. 

Mark: Sure. Or prevent eviction. Or, in some cases, they might want to seize the apartments through eminent domain or seize the vacant apartments.

Or they might want to force the units to go back on the market. The problem is the numbers. This is a city of 8.5 million people, and while there are certainly thousands of apartments that are vacant for various reasons, the vacancy rate is minuscule.

Jamie: 1%. 

Mark: Yeah. Which is the lowest it's been in our lifetime, literally. If you look at the vacancy rate on the lowest renting apartments it is a rounding error off zero. It is 0.39%. The first time I heard it, I thought that it was a mistake, that the decimal point was in the wrong place.

It is 0.39% for apartments with a rent of, I think, $1,100 or less, which is basically because eventually apartments become vacant because someone leaves or passes away and you need a month or two to renovate it and rent it. 

Jamie: That's about $12,000 a year of rent. You figure the rent burden is supposed to be 50% of your income?

Mark: Technically the goal is you wanna be 30% or less, but a lot of people are at 50%. 

Jamie: So that's somebody making, you know, somewhere between $25,000 and $50,000 a year, which in the city really is not much. 

Mark: There's no shortcut here. We do need more housing supply.

There's no way around it. We need more affordable housing, and we need more of all housing. When I moved to New York City and I got my first apartment on my own, I had a studio on Clinton Avenue and DeKalb, in Clinton Hill, and I paid $550 a month. I didn't have to enter an HPD lottery where your odds are one in 500. 

We definitely need to expand the affordable supply. But we also have to expand all the supply.

Jamie: Everything has to be expanded. I agree with you that numbers have gotten worse, but the notion that New York City has a housing shortage is not particularly new, at least since the Bloomberg era, right?

We have really, really sophisticated, smart government housing mechanisms — way beyond any other city in the country. We’ve got HPD, we’ve got HDC, we have a state agency that's terrific. We've got a state financing agency that's terrific. We have a really deep cadre of affordable housing developers who are just spectacularly sophisticated. Same thing for the market rates. Can't be anything new under the sun to try to do this. Mark: Sure there is. As you know, Jamie, as hard as it is to find locations to build affordable housing, that is only the second biggest challenge in getting this done. The biggest challenge is financing housing. We have 300 projects across New York City right now that have been approved, that have the property and the developer, and they're waiting for financing. Mostly we rely on the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.

That's the biggest source of financing. We do probably 30 of those a year and we have a 300-project backlog. So do the math. We need more ways to finance this.

There's a provision in the rules around the pension fund that allows for 2% of the assets to be invested in what are called “economically-targeted investments” in New York City. Right now, only about 1% of that is actually used. 

Jamie: 2% of 250 billion? 

Mark: 280. 

Jamie: 2% of 280. So it's…

Mark: It's over 5 billion. We've got maybe 2 billion and change right now deployed. This can help to move affordable projects that might not have the financing.

We proposed a plan that would offer mezzanine-level debt convertible to equity, at a rate that is reasonable for retirees, but also low enough that it's attractive to developers. We think you could develop tens of thousands of units that might not otherwise be financed through this plan.

Look, ultimately we need more resources put into this at the city, state and federal level. And we need to mobilize the private sector too, to build more housing of all types. 

Jamie: What does “mobilize the private sector” mean though? They seem pretty mobilized to me. 

Mark: Well, we had to remove all the obstacles to getting housing built. I supported City of Yes as a way to remove some obstacles. Just to name one: to make it easier to convert vacant office buildings to housing. We had this absurd rule that buildings built after 1961 couldn’t be converted. Now that's been extended to 1990, which covers what we need in midtown Manhattan, where we have 90 million square feet of vacant office space.

City of Yes will remove that obstacle and we’re going to get some buildings. The Pfizer Building on 42nd Street — it's gonna be the largest conversion in American history. 1,500 units, and I believe it'll have affordable units as well. But there are other obstacles as well: the environmental review process, which was put in place for the right reasons, is now being weaponized by people who have no interest in the environment who are stopping projects that are actually good for the environment. If you're going to build 200 units of housing on top of a subway, that is good for the environment. The alternative is that you have 200 single family homes in the suburbs. That's not a win. 

Jamie: I hear you saying that space is not the issue; financing is the first issue. I'm a finance person, so that's my valence. On the other hand, as the Chair of the Board of NYCHA, what we have to play with is space. That's what NYCHA has to offer to the housing crisis, basically. We're looking at our use of space. Do you think space is part of the solution here, and what can we do?

Mark: Oh, absolutely. Okay. There's a myth that there's nowhere to build in Manhattan or New York City: “Manhattan is built out, so too bad.” When I got to the office of borough president, I had the land use team review every single block, every property in the borough, to find places where we can create housing.

They came back with 171 sites. These are surface parking; they are unused or underused publicly owned facilities; these are single story retail buildings where we could build housing on top. There are some towers-in-a-park campuses where we could use infill to build more housing. Our projection was that those sites we identified could unleash the creation of over 70,000 units of housing.

Jamie: And those are as of right?

Mark: Most were as of right, some would require a rezoning. But it didn't rely on any heroic assumptions, and we didn't think any of them were politically unpalatable. Right. And that's just Manhattan; there are even more opportunities in the other four boroughs.

There is room to build the housing we need in New York. It doesn't mean it won't be a political fight; it doesn't mean in some cases we're not going to have to search for financing if it's affordable. But it's a myth that there's nowhere to build in Manhattan and New York City. 

Jamie: Are there other components of affordability that you think you can deal with as comptroller? The other key component of affordability that you talk about on the campaign trail and in your plans is childcare. 

Mark: Yeah. For families with young kids, this is their second biggest expense. In some cases, it can even be the biggest expense. The going rate for childcare is over 20,000 a year, which is just impossible for a family. 

Jamie: 20,000 a year. 

Mark: Yep. 

Jamie: Wow. 

Mark: What happens is parents drop out of the workforce because they don't have the option to hire somebody or to put their kid into a program. That has an economic cost, because you're losing workers and that person would have been paying taxes.

It makes economic sense to ensure everybody has free childcare if they need it. We have a model here in UPK [Universal Pre-K] and 3K [for children starting at age 3], and we should just extend that down into toddlers — I would even say newborns down to six months. We should be building on that model, relying on center-based care and school-based care. To really meet our numbers, we’re going to have much more home-based care, too. 

Jamie: And you would pay for this?

Mark: Yeah. 

Jamie: What's the cost? 

Mark: It's probably about 2 billion a year to do it right. There's income on the upside of parents who go back to work and pay some taxes. It would be an investment, but if you're looking for a big, bold investment to solve the affordability crisis, I don't think you could find a better option than making childcare free and universal in every neighborhood.

Jamie: Is there room for reviewing at some level? Reviewing how government works in an effort to reduce cost overall?

Mark: 100%, or to get more out of what we are paying. In every city agency, there are antiquated systems. There are fax machines in use in New York City government still. 

Jamie: But how would you get a fax if you took out the fax machine?

Mark: Exactly. 

Jamie: You didn't think of that, huh?

Mark: There's still a lot done on actual pen and paper in New York City government. We certainly haven't adapted to the mobile phone revolution. To give you one example, there are probably a quarter of a million people in New York City who qualify for food stamps who don't receive them.

What if instead of making them fill out a PDF with dropdown menus and all that, they could just talk to their smartphone in plain English or plain any language and enroll in food stamps? That’s not even New York City money; that's coming from the federal government. It would help families put food on the table; it would be good for local supermarkets. That would be a win. It would require building out some more modern technological systems. The comptroller's office is a really good place to push for that, and I can tell a similar story across almost every city agency where, by modernizing and tapping the tools of modern technology, we can deliver more for taxpayers and get better results for New Yorkers.

Jamie: When you talk about what you want to do as comptroller, you actually sound like somebody who wants to be comptroller, not somebody who wants to be comptroller for a term and then go do something else. 

Mark: I'm not scared to admit it. This would be a dream job. 

Jamie: Wow. It's your dirty secret. You actually want to be comptroller.

Mark: Well, now it's public. 

Jamie: That's fantastic. Mark Levine, thanks for being here. It was great to talk to you.

Mark: Thank you, Jamie. Real pleasure. Thank you.

Jamie: Here are my three takeaways from my conversation with Mark Levine.

The first takeaway from my conversation with Mark was around childhood vaccination rates. In New York City, the city's vaccination rate for children below two years old is down to 81%. He said we need it to be 95% for herd immunity for any given disease, and it was 88% a few years ago. Given the number of children we're talking about in New York City, which is probably in the hundreds of thousands, that is a huge drop. 

There was an opinion piece in the New York Times last week by a woman who was a journalist in Texas about why she and her neighbors lost faith in the public health system and in vaccinations as a result of what they went through during COVID. 

It was a perfectly sensible piece, but I think New York Times readers in New York would've read it and thought, “Oh great, well that's Texas. It has nothing to do with New York.” That is just clearly not true. This statistic is a real eye-opener. It's crazy that what we think of as being an outlier problem is a New York City problem.

The second thing that caused me to step back and think a little bit about, and think with Mark about, is what the role of the comptroller in New York City actually is. It's a very complicated job. It's got at least three distinct roles. It's got this audit and oversight role over the rest of the city government.

He manages these enormous pension funds, over $200 billion of retirement pension funds for public employees. 

And then he’s got this quasi-policymaking role, which basically has to be exercised through persuasion and using a bully pulpit and using the tools that exist, [unlike] the mayor [who can more directly be involved in] executing policies or passing bills. 

The question is, which of those kinds of comptroller does Mark Levine want to be? My strong sense from talking to him is he wants to be a policy-forward comptroller, which is interesting, but he's going to have to decide which of the various tools at his disposal he feels most comfortable using to advance his policies. If I think about past comptrollers, they more often, at least longer ago, were fiscal managers for whom their first job was to make sure the pension fund does okay — make sure the city is running okay, that the city fiscal situation is solid, and then think about policy later.

I think [Mark’s is] an interesting approach and if done well, it could be the best of all those different roles, but in some ways, it's a higher risk strategy. It requires him to be really adept politically, particularly if he ends up with the mayor as his foil or if the mayor is particularly unmanageable.

Choosing the policy-slash-political route is a higher bar to clear. Maybe Mark is somebody who could do that.

That's not to say that I'm endorsing Mark Levine or that I think that he would be a better comptroller than somebody else. Mark, he's a numerate guy. He is well positioned to do any of those things, and maybe he can actually knit them all together nicely. 

My third takeaway is specifically around a policy that Mark has put at the center of his campaign, which is the idea that the pension fund that he's going to be overseeing should invest directly in New York City affordable housing. This has some serious challenges that he is aware of, but doesn't talk about. I think it's worth understanding what they are. Moving a lot of money around inside a pension fund is really, really difficult: getting hold of the money, understanding how much there is, figuring out what it’s invested in currently, and then where you're going to reinvest it for at least as good a return (because that's your obligation to the retirees).

Retirees, particularly his retirees, have strong opinions about things. His retirees are basically public union members. They sit on his boards and his investment committees, and they have strong views about not only where the pension should be invested, but about things like affordable housing — what that's going to look like, where it’s going to be, what kind of labor it’s going to be built with.

Not that he can't get there, but he's going to have to get their permission to do this. That's gonna take a lot of work and convincing. 

And then there's the actual doing of it. If you’re talking about even a couple of billion dollars, that's like, the size of a midsize private equity fund. While he may just outsource that to somebody who already does it, he may want to build up the capability to do it in-house. I can tell you as somebody who's been in the finance world for a long time, that means hiring people — hiring good people — and building up a process to evaluate investments that are going to come flooding in.

That's not a turn-it-on-overnight situation. If he's elected, he is going to be there for four years until he runs again. It could take four years to get up and running, and I don't think that's how people in his position generally think about this kind of activity.

Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.