(thoughtful theme music) (dramatic news theme music) - [Reporter] Today, the Senate majority will pass legislation that-- (indistinct speaking) - I will fight like hell for you every single day, like I've always done, and always will.

(layered indistinct voices) - Welcome to this special edition of New York NOW.

I'm Dan Clark.

This week, we're talking about infrastructure, but not in the way you're probably thinking.

When we talk about infrastructure, we usually focus on roads, bridges, tunnels, that sort of thing, but there is so much more to the word, and we see a lot of that in New York.

Take broadband.

It's not the same as building a highway, but it takes a lot of infrastructure to get people connected.

And while more people have broadband now in New York than they did 10 years ago, access remains a huge issue, especially in rural areas, not just because of cost, which feels like it's going up every month, but because of the physical build-outs that need to happen.

The FCC says that 98% of New Yorkers have access to high-speed internet, and they define that as having speeds up to 25 megabits per second or more.

For context, that's enough to surf the web and stream video, but it won't support a family of users.

But the data is misleading in a way that paints a very different picture from reality.

As reporter Darrell Camp explains in this report, access to broadband is a bigger problem than people think, and the road ahead is complicated.

Take a look.

(dramatic news theme music) - [Darrell] Electricity, water, gas.

Three services that many New Yorkers would find it hard to live without.

Over the last 18 months, those services were protected for those in financial hardship, and with many people working and learning from home, the pandemic shined a light on another service that is hard to live without: high-speed internet or broadband.

Even pre-pandemic, access to broadband in New York has been an issue for years.

Former Governor Andrew Cuomo even tried to kick one of the largest internet service providers, Spectrum, out of the state when the company was slow to expand internet access across New York.

That's something the company agreed to do when it bought Time Warner Cable a few years back.

That's gotten better, but thousands of New Yorkers still don't have access to broadband, and with how vital it's become to everyday life, some say it should be regulated as a utility, like gas and electric.

Richard Berkley leads the Public Utility Law Project.

- In New York, we need two kinds of availability of broadband.

First is actual retail availability, and we call that physical access.

The other is affordability, and that's social access, but that also requires for the fairly large number of households in New York that don't have any kind of broadband, they need to have the devices and they need to have the knowledge.

- [Darrell] For New York's rural communities, access continues to be an issue, because the infrastructure just isn't there, and the cost to build out that infrastructure isn't cheap.

Senator Peter Oberacker is from Otsego County.

He is the top Republican on the Internet and Technology Committee, and he's seen firsthand how building out broadband can be near impossible for those without access.

- The nine counties that I represent in the 51st are very rural, and so the challenge is, really, is topography, is the distance between homes.

Now, here's the interesting part.

I don't have it at my house.

It's a mile from my house, and to get it there, we were inquiring about it, and it was north of $50,000 to get it to come to my house.

- [Darrell] The state has claimed that 98% of households in New York have access to broadband, but that number can be misleading.

It comes from the FCC, which measures data by census block, and because of how it's collected, that data doesn't reflect access to broadband on a house-by-house level.

Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara is a Democrat from the Albany area who chairs the state Commission on Rural Resources.

- Our mapping in New York State is not good.

It goes by census block.

It's a very old way of identifying who has service and who doesn't, so census blocks are very, very large.

As you can imagine, in rural communities, that's very problematic, so anywhere from 240 to 1,200 homes in a census block, and the way the methodology is, is even if one home out of there, one home is served, they consider that census block to have service.

That's obviously not true.

- [Darrell] And access to broadband can be even worse for older generations.

That was the case during the pandemic, when a lot of everyday life shifted online.

Bill Ferris from AARP says the created a digital gap between seniors and the services they need.

- There's studies out there in New York that say that 40% of older New Yorkers, 65 and older don't have access to the internet.

And that's a problem, especially with the increasing of the use of telehealth that we have seen during the pandemic, both for federal programs and state healthcare programs, access to the internet is actually becoming essential here in New York, especially for the people we represent.

- [Darrell] But access to broadband isn't just an issue in New York's rural communities.

It's also a problem in New York cities.

Stuart Reid from the Harlem-based Digital Divide Partners works on providing access to people who live in public housing.

He says that availability does not necessarily equal access.

- Of those half a million people, a full 50% do not have internet access at home.

And that is compounded by the fact that 50% of the population is unemployed, and the average income of this group is at the poverty level, just hovering above $25,000.

- [Darrell] Reid says it would go a long way if there were free universal internet access in public housing, but for rural New Yorkers, there's more to consider, like the infrastructure issue and the cost for providers.

Senator Daphne Jordan represents a district in the Capital Region that has urban, suburban, and rural areas, and she says broadband expansion faces several hurdles, like something called the fiber optic tax.

- Because now, under New York State law, they have to pay for the right of way along the roads for which their broadband expansion is going to run.

No other utility has to do that, just place that on broadband providers, like one of those cheap money grabs.

- [Darrell] One solution, Jordan says, would be to issue tax credits to residents and businesses who have to pay providers to expand service into their area, but Oberacker, the senator from Otsego, says there's also a disconnect for some lawmakers between how access to broadband varies in rural areas versus cities.

He says he'd like to bring other members of the Senate to his district to show them why it's different.

- And then that would lead for us to also educate bringing in private industry, right, bringing in the actual suppliers and the same thing, and having that dialogue.

- [Darrell] But there could also be a common solution to help both rural and urban areas with broadband access, and that's funding.

Here's Berkley again.

- New York built the Erie Canal, the largest public-private project of its day, the most successful one ever built.

So the Erie Canal was so successful and it was a combination of private and public money that even before it was finished, it had to be bigger to meet the needs of the state, and New York opened the west because of the Erie Canal.

So I think we can do this kinda thing right.

I think it's a shame that we have to toss public money into this, but if we do this, then we will get the outcome that we need.

(dramatic news theme music) - So we'll see what the Hochul administration finds out from that mapping survey, and how the state responds.

Broadband was something that the previous Cuomo administration helped expand, but didn't quite reach everyone, and it's a big issue for a lot of people.

The key here, lawmakers say, is not to just expand broadband, but make it reliable as well.

That means consistent speeds and no trouble getting connected.

And speaking of which, we'll turn now to another lagging part of New York's infrastructure.

That's cell coverage.

So if you're watching this week from a city, you probably don't have this problem, but cell coverage in New York's rural counties leaves much to be desired.

I grew up in Chenango County, and decades later, there's still no cell service where I lived, and that's not unique.

If you get above Lake George in the North Country, cell coverage is less than spotty.

Really every area of the state has its own dead zones, and they're not small.

That's why a few years back, the state created the Upstate Cellular Coverage Task Force, and just a few months ago, that task force finally released a report on expanding cell coverage in New York.

Assembly Member Angelo Santabarbara served on that task force.

We spoke at the time about its findings, and what should be next in New York.

(dramatic news theme music) Assembly Member Angelo Santabarbara, thank you so much for being here.

- Thanks, great to be on the show again, Dan.

- Of course.

So we're talking about something that is so important in Upstate New York, its cell coverage, and I know to people watching, that might be like oh, why do we care about that?

I probably have service at my house in the city of Albany or even maybe your rural community has service, but imagine driving up 87 to Lake George for the weekend and you get into a car wreck, and then you can't call 911.

So now we have this Upstate Cellular Coverage Task Force.

It was established in 2019.

It's just released a report in early October or late September about what can really be done about this, so let's start with, what is the status of cell coverage in Upstate New York right now?

- Well, part of the task force, one of the initiatives that they were tasked with doing is actually measuring that, and finding out where we had coverage and where we didn't have coverage, because there was some dispute when you, over where coverage is good and where it wasn't good and where it was nonexistent, and part of it was actually measuring, going out and measuring with devices where service was available and where there wasn't any service, and cell companies will say, oh, you have service, we have the coverage areas and we see these maps, but then you go out into those areas and you can't make a call, so part of what we needed to do here was figure that out, so what we saw is, there's a lot of, the blue areas on the report, a 71-page report, you see that there's a lot of areas of, especially in Upstate, that do not have coverage, more than 2,000 miles of roadway with zero coverage, not counting the actual rural communities where there are, there's no cell service in those areas.

As you said, can you imagine being in your home or living somewhere, landlines are almost a thing of the past right now, but not being able to make a call or having to travel to make a call, and if it's an emergency, how do you do that?

That was part of what this task force was designed to address, to come up with solutions to overcome those obstacles.

- And some of those landlines now need electricity, so if you lose your power in this emergency, there's not really much you can do there.

So I guess my question is, is it just that we don't have the infrastructure in these areas without the cell service, because I think most of us know, we get cell coverage from towers, at least I think that's still how it works, so do we just not have that infrastructure in place to provide this coverage in a more universal way?

- Well, there's a number of things.

The towers are needed.

You need to towers to get the service, no doubt about it.

There are obstacles that were described in the report, some of them being regulatory, and coming up with a way to streamline that process is important, but also access to the land, having the property to do it, so the report talks about having access to state lands and right of ways, and then there's always, there's an environmental piece that goes into this.

Those large towers that you just mentioned are an area of concern for environmental areas that are protected or have strict regulations on what can and cannot be developed.

When you develop a cell tower, we see the tower, but there's a lot of site development that needs to happen, infrastructure around the tower itself, so there are things to overcome, the obstacles that we talked about, giving access to the property, but also taking advantage of new technology.

It doesn't have to be the super large towers, and I think we can come to an agreement where everybody can come to a sort of a consensus, meet, the agencies can meet halfway and the environmental groups, where we can find something that works and does what it needs to do, which is make sure people are connected and make sure people can make those calls, especially emergency calls, when they have to.

- Right.

The report recommends putting cell coverage in certain areas, so we're not talking about universal cell coverage in the rural areas of the Adirondack Park for example.

You wanna put it on interstate and US highways, New York State highways and larger mainstream country roads, and that's gonna cost, the report estimates, $610 million.

Tell me where we get the money.

- The, well the money obviously has to come from the state budget.

The New New York Broadband Program was a program that we invested in, we put that incentive out there.

Part of what we need to do is incentivize this development of this infrastructure, and I think leveraging the public-private partnership, that's done with making the investment, and I think that investment does have to be made.

What you said is right.

This report, I look at it as a, it's not a silver bullet where it's gonna solve all our problems.

There're a lot of rural areas that, communities that don't have service.

This report talks about that, but it says as an initial step here, let's make this investment to cover our major roadways, where you can get on a roadway and make a call if you need to, and even some of the local roads that we're talking about, if we can get that far, then we can move onto the next step, so I look at this as sort of a, there's more, there has to be more beyond this, but making the initial investment is a good first step, adopting these new policies, making the commitment to do that I think is where we need to be.

Going into January, into the new session, we need to set aside this funding.

This task force was put together in 2019, so here we are in 2021, why is it two years later, we're still talking about making an investment when we identified problems back in 2019?

This investment needs to be made.

Not, going back to what we saw over the last 18 months, the pandemic, certainly broadband played a big role.

If you had it, you might've been able to get through without too much, there were certainly challenges, but there was more challenge and more difficulty in every aspect of our lives without broadband.

You look at cell coverage, we weren't even talking about cell coverage during the pandemic, but it exists, not only are people without broadband, there are people without broadband and without cell coverage, which, as you can imagine, life nowadays, it touches every part of our lives.

When you look at the technology, we need it for, it's not really a luxury.

It is a necessity.

- Yeah, in fact, when you look at broadband across the state as well, the FCC has done reports on this, there are areas of the state that have cell coverage but not broadband, and that became really, really important during the pandemic for people that either had their kids going to school but they didn't have broadband, so now they're using their cell phone as a hotspot, so thank goodness they had that cell coverage.

- And yeah, there's a mix out there, what's available, and that's part of what this report talked about too is, if you have one, you should probably have the other.

There's a way to merge this infrastructure.

If we have some infrastructure out there that offers broadband, we can use that similar, that same infrastructure, sort of a shared service to be able to provide both.

Both are important, and I think that we need to look at this, you know, years ago, they ran electricity and telephone lines to every house, they needed to do that, we need to look at these services the same way that they were looked at back then.

This is essential.

We gotta get it out there.

This is not just playing games on the internet.

This is education, this is telehealth.

This is work at home.

This, we have to change the conversation.

This is really something that's a public utility.

We need to look at it that way, and I think new policies going forward need to treat it as such.

- Well, we'll see what happens in the state budget.

I imagine that it will probably have support, because this is, as you said, pretty important nowadays, so we'll see how it shakes out.

- It's a top issue for me, certainly, and the rural areas I represent, and I think all of Upstate is the most impact here, so I think Upstate communities sort of got, have been overlooked and lacking these services.

It's time to address them, and now as we were talking about, rebuilding back, post-pandemic, we need to really look at, how do we do that?

We gotta address the things that were highlighted and things that were overlooked in the past that need attention now, and I'm hopeful with our new governor, I have written a letter to her, I'm hopeful that this'll get on her radar and it will get done in the next session, starting with the investment we need in the state budget.

- All right, we'll look forward to seeing it.

Assembly Member Angelo Santabarbara, thank you so much.

- Thank you, great to be here.

(dramatic news theme music) - So the next step is to act on that report.

That would be up to the state, and as we said, a lot of it relies on the state budget.

Governor Kathy Hochul will release her first state budget proposal in just a few weeks.

When that happens, we'll tell you about it on that week's show, so don't forget to tune in.

In the meantime, affordable housing is expected to be a top issue for state lawmakers in the new legislative session.

There's been a lot of talk recently about access to housing in New York, whether it's because of cost or just infrastructure.

This week, we're looking at the infrastructure side of things as it relates to affordable housing.

New York would need another 600,000 affordable rental units to fill the affordable housing gap for low-income residents.

That's according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

And in the next few weeks, we'll hear a lot more on that as the new legislative session begins in Albany.

For more on the state's affordable housing crisis, I spoke recently with Jolie Milstein who heads the State Association for Affordable Housing.

(dramatic news theme music) Jolie, thank you so much for being here.

I really appreciate it.

- It's our pleasure.

- So we're here talking about affordable housing, which I think is something that a lot of New Yorkers don't really know too much about, because a lot of New Yorkers don't have to have affordable housing or public housing, so let's start there.

What would you describe as the state of affordable housing in New York right now?

Do we have enough?

Do we need more?

How are we doing?

- Well let's agree on what it is that we're talking about.

When we talk about affordable housing at New York State's Association for Affordable Housing of which I'm the president and CEO, we're talking about a public-private partnership that builds housing and maintains it for low-income and very low-income New Yorkers.

So it's really a partnership.

The money to build these buildings is a combination of tax credits provided by government entities and private debt and it's a variety of sources, but residents all have to income qualify, so not anyone can live in a building that's considered affordable housing.

In our world, you have to income qualify and not make more than a certain amount of annual income to be able to live in these partnership buildings.

- And can I interrupt you for just a second?

Is affordable housing the same thing as public housing?

What's the difference?

- So public housing is different.

Public housing is built exclusively with government money and run by governments.

In New York City, that takes the form of NYCHA, and around New York State, there're a variety of different government entities that are public housing authorities that manage, own and manage those public housing units.

Those are different than what we call affordable housing, which is privately owned, but built with government support.

- Okay, so if somebody can't get into affordable housing because there may not be access and isn't in public housing, what happens to those people?

Are we just dealing with people that will then become homeless?

- Not necessarily homeless, but we consider them rent-burdened, and over half of New York State renters, I think the number is over half, are rent-burdened, which the definition is that those residents pay more than 30% of their income towards housing.

And you can imagine in most neighborhoods, certainly in the five boroughs and across many of the high-opportunity areas of New York State, many many residents are paying more than 30% of their income towards their rent.

- Wow, that's quite a bit of income to put towards rent, and I know that rent prices can be high.

It's outrageous sometimes.

So-- - Sometimes it's extremely high, and getting higher with the severe shortage that we have.

It's a supply and demand equation, and the supply is severely limited.

We're really in a housing crisis even before the pandemic, and what happens in addition to homelessness is people double up, they can't afford other necessities like transportation and food, so there're a whole host of bad outcomes when there's a housing shortage as we have now.

- So what do we do about that?

If we don't have enough affordable housing, how do we get more I guess?

Is this just strictly on government?

Is it on private developers?

How do we boost access to affordable housing?

- Well, there're a number of levers that we can move to try and increase supply.

That's really NYSAFAH's main job as a supply-side organization for the industry.

First and foremost is finding more federal resources.

Most affordable housing in New York State and across the country are built with a federal tax credit.

The low-income housing tax credit accounts for I think 85% of most units that are built in the United States since its passing decades ago.

There's current federal legislation to increase the amount of those resources by 50%, so there's certainly the financial piece which has to be addressed.

There're also bureaucratic roadblocks.

Zoning issues often come up, the not in my backyard, NIMBY issues keep a lot of projects from going forward.

Most recently during this pandemic, there've been supply chain problems.

Lumber prices quadrupled for a while.

We couldn't get refrigerators and other appliances for new units.

So I'd say first and foremost, it's a financing gap, but there're also other things that get in the way of being able to address the severe need.

- Now, can we fill that gap with public housing?

I guess I'm just looking for solutions, because if we have these roadblocks that government can't necessarily get past, how do we do it?

Is it just a sense of trying to make the case to the state that this needs to happen, or is this about engaging with communities to make sure that we will be able to do this in these places?

- Well it's all of the above.

We can't build more public housing at the moment.

There's a national law that does not allow for more, the construction of more public housing because the way it was originally conceived, built by government and maintained by government, the federal government actually hasn't kept up the maintenance of many of those projects.

That's why I think there's a multi-billion dollar funding need in the case of NYCHA, and we're trying our best to shore up the existing public housing units, but we're not building more public housing at this time, which means that these public-private partnerships have to step up and fill the need.

We're doing that with the state legislature and with the current last year of a five-year housing plan.

We're really looking at NYSAFAH to advocate for another multi-year plan.

That's one of our top priorities, is to get the state to authorize.

In fact, the legislature passed a five-year planning bill.

We really need an institutionalized multi-year housing planning cycle so that we can ensure that we don't have gaps in the funding and in the process of awarding those resources to developers.

- So if we get everybody onboard, the developers, the government, that partnership, I wonder how infrastructure plays into this.

Do we have the space, the places, do we have enough that we can create this affordable housing to hopefully fill those gaps that we have right now?

- Well finding sites is a huge challenge, but I think an even bigger challenge is building these units sustainably, so when you talk about infrastructure, we really need to move with the governor's climate law, CLCPA and with New York City's Local Law 97, we're really looking at much more sustainable developments, so we can't build the way we have, and part of that is the energy grid that supports all of these developments, so we have to work hand in hand with municipalities to make sure that the infrastructure exists on the ground to build enough units, and we have to find the financial resources to build green and build sustainably.

- Yeah, like I said at the start, this is just something that a lot of people don't know about, because they've never had to rely on affordable housing, so I'm glad that we got to have this conversation.

It's something that is not just a New York City problem, it's a problem all around the state.

You see it in really every city, but we will leave it there, Jolie Milstein from the Association for Affordable Housing, thank you so much.

- Oh, it's my pleasure.

(dramatic news theme music) - And also in housing, New York's eviction moratorium from the COVID-19 pandemic is set to expire on January 15th.

Some lawmakers want that extended, others say it's time for it to end, so we'll see how that shakes out in the next two weeks.

Lawmakers are back in Albany this coming week for the new legislative session, and on Wednesday, join us here on your local PBS channel for wide coverage of Governor Kathy Hochul's State of the State address.

She'll be giving that speech in the State Assembly Chamber, and we'll be right here in the studio to bring it to you live with analysis from top-notch experts.

So we'll see you then.

Have a great rest of your weekend, and be well.

(dramatic news theme music) - [Narrator] Funding for New York NOW is provided by WNET.