NYC Council Elections 2021: Tricia Shimamura Seeks UES Seat

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Voters in New York City's 5th Council district, which includes parts of the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island, will see seven names on their ballots when they vote in the June 22 primary election.

One of those names will be Tricia Shimamura, a social worker, community board member and former deputy chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney who is among the Democrats seeking to replace term-limited incumbent Ben Kallos. (Kallos is running for Manhattan Borough President.)

Patch reached out to all candidates in the election to create these profiles. Shimamura's responses are below.

Age (as of Election Day)

32

Position Sought

City Council District 5

Party Affiliation

Democrat

Neighborhood of residence (i.e., East Village, Astoria, etc.)

Upper East Side

Family

Husband - Dov Gibor; Son - Teddy Shimamura Gibor

Does anyone in your family work in politics or government?

n/a

Education

Bachelor's Degree from Kenyon College; Masters in Social Work from NYU

Occupation

Director of Government Affairs at Columbia University since 2015

Previous or Current Elected or Appointed Office

I am a first time candidate for public office, and I have proudly spent my career serving my community as the former Deputy Chief of Staff to Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and as the current 1st Vice Chair of Manhattan Community Board 8 and Co-Chair of the Parks and Waterfront Committee.

Campaign website

triciaforny.nyc

Why are you seeking elective office?

I’m running for City Council because I love my community and I want to do everything I can to ensure that the working families, seniors, small businesses, and every other resident living here can thrive. The Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island is my home - it’s where I’m raising my son and it’s where I’ve spent my career as a social worker fighting for some of our most vulnerable New Yorkers. I’m running to pick up the garbage, build more affordability, care for our families, expand our parks, create safe streets for everyone to use and form a more accessible and equitable city for all New Yorkers.

The single most pressing issue facing our (board, district, etc.) is _______, and this is what I intend to do about it.

As our City begins to overcome the pandemic of this last year, we must prioritize helping our communities recover from COVID-19, and that comes down to building true affordability in every neighborhood of New York City. As a City Council Member, I will fight for true rent relief for tenants, expand our rent-stabilized affordable housing stock, and build new affordable housing in our district. I will hold legal clinics and town halls to help empower tenants with the tools they need to remain in their homes. Moreover, I will prioritize protecting low-income families and tenants living in NYCHA. We must hold NYCHA leadership accountable, reform ticketing and repairs processes, and lobby for funding on the City, State, and Federal level to preserve this housing stock - without privatizing it. We must also take a compassionate and comprehensive approach to addressing our crisis of homelessness. I believe that all New Yorkers deserve safe, affordable, and consistent housing, and I will work diligently to make that vision a reality in our City Council.

What are the critical differences between you and the other candidates seeking this post?

I have spent my career fighting for my neighbors in District 5, and I believe my experience and perspective as a social worker and a longtime community advocate set me apart in my race. As a former Deputy Chief of Staff to Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, I fought to improve the air quality and housing conditions of our NYCHA neighbors, supported our small businesses as we completed Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway, coordinated funding and repairs for the East River Esplanade, and helped deliver healthcare to 9/11 first responders. I have served on our local Community Board 8 for nearly 6 years and am currently the First Vice Chair as well as Co-Chair of the Parks and Waterfront Committee. I have continued to fight for a more just, resilient, affordable, and accessible city for all New Yorkers, and firmly believe that I have the experience to create the change needed to bring real benefits to my district.
On a personal level, I am a proud Japanese Puerto Rican, running in a district that has never elected a person of color. When I’m elected to City Council, I will not only be the first ever person of color to represent my district but also the first ever Japanese American elected in New York State. I’m a working parent who, like hundreds of thousands of other families in our City, is struggling to balance the demands of work and childcare at the same time. I’m a bus rider, a park user and a renter. I carry with me the very real, lived experiences of these unique communities and identities, all of which inform the type of legislator I will be.

Do you support or oppose the New York Blood Center's proposed tower and rezoning? If you oppose it, should it be scrapped entirely, or just revised?

I wholeheartedly stand in solidarity with our community against the blood center tower and believe the project should be scrapped entirely. I am the First Vice Chair of our local Community Board 8 as well as Co-Chair of the Parks and Waterfront Committee, and I proudly voted against the proposal put forward by Longfellow Real Estate. On the Parks and Waterfront Committee, I led the opposition against this project on the basis of its significant diminishment of sunlight in St. Catherine’s Park from March through September. The 334-foot commercial tower, which is intended to replace an existing, modest 3-story mid-block building in a quiet neighborhood, would set a dangerous precedent for inappropriate mid-block rezonings, not only in our district, but across the entire city. The impacts on our zoning regulations, our students, parkspace and sunlight, and surrounding residents cannot be overlooked or ignored. I’m running to be a strong voice in our City Council who will put the needs of our community first by supporting our children and families, our parks, and our small businesses, and by holding developers accountable to truly serving our community.

Ben Kallos worked to bring a Safe Haven shelter to the district — would you have done the same, and would you do so again for another shelter, if elected?

Our city is facing a severe crisis of homelessness - a crisis only exacerbated by the pandemic of the last year. While I do support the proposed Safe Haven, I believe we must also enact broader policy initiatives to solve the root causes of homelessness: I will fight for more affordable housing to prevent vulnerable New Yorkers from becoming unhoused, implement effective social services programming to better support community members struggling with mental illness, and create long-term wraparound services such as permanent housing and workforce development to help homeless neighbors succeed. The de Blasio administration has proposed ineffective, short-term fixes that fail to bring about larger change or provide unhoused New Yorkers with the dignified, supportive care they need. As a City Council Member and a social worker, I am committed to championing long-term, comprehensive policies that help to permanently uplift New Yorkers from our streets into stable housing conditions and social services.

While police statistics show crime mostly dropping on the Upper East Side, many residents report feeling less safe in the neighborhood than they used to. Why do you think this is, and is adding more police the way to solve it?

Every New Yorker deserves to feel safe walking on our streets, using our parks, and riding our subways, and as an Asian American woman, I share many of the safety concerns of our neighbors. I believe New Yorkers feel safe when we have activated streets that are free of garbage, have thriving small businesses, have pedestrian-friendly and accessible sidewalks, and urban plantings that build our resiliency and create a welcoming, vibrant streetscape. I also understand that many New Yorkers feel unsafe because the last year has engendered a significant rise in hate. As an Asian American woman whose family is also Jewish, the crisis of hate in our country is a lived experience that I am acutely aware of and committed to addressing and dismantling. We need to address broader systems of inequity and hatred that have left countless New Yorkers feeling unsafe not only in recent months but for decades.

We must ensure that the police can address instances of violent crime while also working collectively to adopt a community-centered approach to public safety where residents, small businesses, older adults, low-income residents, and families can come together to determine what safety and policing look like in our community.

What single policy would you advocate for to make housing more affordable on the Upper East Side?

The housing affordability crisis, while severely worsened by the financial conditions of COVID-19, has existed for far too long in New York City and cannot be resolved by a single policy proposal. Rather, I believe in fighting for a comprehensive, multilayered approach that prioritizes two goals: one, preserving our existing affordable housing stock and keeping people in their homes, and two, building new affordable housing stock that makes our city more equitable for future generations. As a City Council Member, I will fight to dramatically increase our rent-stabilized housing stock, expand the right to counsel for far more tenants facing eviction, advocate to Albany to pass true rent forgiveness, and fight to enact a permanent winter months eviction moratorium. I will work to increase our affordable housing supply by expanding existing housing subsidy programs and by reforming the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) program to push developers to meet actual housing needs - not market demand. Finally, I will advocate relentlessly for the full funding that NYCHA residents desperately need and deserve to live in safe and clean housing. We need an integrated, intersectional approach to housing policy to serve community members across New York City, and I am committed to making our city’s housing more affordable, accessible, and equitable for years to come

Would you push to add more bike lanes in the district?

As both a pedestrian and a biker, I believe we need a measured approach to creating new bike lanes in our community. While I support the creation of a thoughtful, comprehensive bike lane network across New York City to keep both pedestrians and bikers safe, we cannot have a top-down approach from the Department of Transportation for where bike lanes should be placed in our community. I believe in a community-driven model that engages local businesses, older adults, people with disabilities, families, bikers and pedestrians advocates to determine where bike lanes are most appropriate in our neighborhood. We must ensure that our streets are usable for people with a myriad of different abilities and modes of transportation, and that decision must be grounded in the needs and desires of our own community.

Describe the other issues that define your campaign platform.

As a working mother the struggle to find affordable childcare is extremely personal to me and I will continue to champion this critical economic issue until we ensure that childcare is a right and not a luxury. The US is one of the only industrialized nations in the world that does not provide a legal right to early childhood education for children. Countless parents, particularly women, are unable to return to work due to their inability to afford child care. Our economic crisis will continue without childcare relief, and I want to get New Yorkers back to work. We need to enact universal childcare in which we create a sliding scale based on wages for childcare centers to ensure that parents never have to pay more in daycare than they do to feed and house their children. We also need to create financial and professional support for childcare providers to grow their centers and take on additional children. Finally, the City should look towards using empty storefronts that are at an all-time high for greater amounts of space to build out childcare, extended day, and after school programs to ensure that all New York City families are supported. Child care must be part of the basic economic infrastructure of our country, and New York City can and should be a beacon of progress for the rest of the United States.

What accomplishments in your past would you cite as evidence you can handle this job?

I served as Deputy Chief to our Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, where I oversaw hundreds of constituent cases, helped manage critical infrastructure projects (including the completion of Phase 1 of the Second Ave Subway), and helped deliver healthcare to 9/11 first responders. I currently serve as First Vice Chair of Community Board 8 as well as Co-Chair of the Parks and Waterfront Committee, where I have played an active role in critical land use, resiliency, and recovery issues that have shaped our neighborhood. I’m particularly proud to have successfully advocated for over $300 million dollars of funding for the East River Esplanade, fought against the privatization of NYCHA in my district, and have continued to oppose the ill-planned NY Blood Center tower that would have a devastating impact on our local schools, parkland, and pedestrian safety. I’m also extremely proud to be a part of the weekly team of volunteers who have continuously come together to run a food pantry for neighbors in need on Roosevelt Island throughout the pandemic. I have spent years fighting at the federal and local level for the well-being of this community and have the experience to not only pass critical policies to benefit our neighborhood but also to provide individualized, compassionate services to every resident of District 5.

The best advice ever shared with me was:

Assemblywoman Nily Rozic once told me to never apologize for my last name. I am incredibly proud to be running in this race as a Shimamura, as a Asian American and Latina, and an unapologetic woman of color. I would be honored to serve as the first ever Japanese American elected in New York state.

What else would you like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

Currently, there are only two mothers with school age children serving in the New York City Council, and there has never been a Japanese American elected to public office in New York State. Representation matters, and our families matter. I’m running to be a voice for the millions of families in our city and to break barriers that have led to an elected body that does not reflect the diversity of its constituents. I'm very proud to have been endorsed by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, State Senator Liz Krueger, Assemblywoman Rebecca Seawright, Council Member Helen Rosenthal, former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, former District 5 Council Member Jessica Lappin, East River Democratic Club, Tenants PAC, Met Council Action, Sierra Club NYC Group, Resilience PAC, The Jewish Vote, National Institute of Reproductive Health Action Fund, #VOTEPROCHOICE, Vote Mama, Progressive Women of NY, Roadmap for Progress, Women of Color for Progress, Run for Something, NASW PACE NYC, New American Leaders Action Fund, 21 in ‘21, and over 50 local community leaders. I’m running to make New York City a more affordable, accessible, equitable place to live for generations to come, and I’d be honored to have your vote on June 22.