This week we sat down with New York State Senator Andrew Gounardes, who represents the 26th District in Brooklyn and chairs the Senate’s Budget and Revenue Committee.

What stuck with us is his diagnosis of the diagnosis. Every politician has learned to say “affordability.” It’s been poll tested, it passed every focus group, and as Andrew puts it, tattoo it on your forehead. Almost nobody has done the harder work of asking why a specific bill is too high for a specific family. He knows because he reads the call log every night. Fifteen calls about food security. Six about landlord-tenant disputes. Eight about people who can’t pay their heating bill. That’s not polling. That’s the district telling him what hurts.

From there we get into the Working Families Tax Credit he drafted on a napkin during downtime in Albany, the 8,000 units going up in Gowanus outside his office window, and why he thinks New York’s population loss is the ballgame: Texas gains five House seats next census, and blue states lose the ability to govern nationally. Stay for the rapid response round, where we find out his retirement plan is being a park ranger at Gettysburg.

What Brooklyn is actually calling about

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m joined by my co-host, Gary Winslett, and today we have a very special guest, Andrew Gounardes, who represents New York’s 26th State Senate District. He covers the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhoods from Brooklyn Heights to DUMBO. He’s served in the Senate since January 2019, where he unseated Republican Marty Golden in what was then the 22nd District.

He chairs the Senate Committee on Budget and Revenue, which makes him a central player in Albany’s annual budget fight and one of the most visible legislators on state tax and fiscal policy. He’s been a major champion of family affordability policy, where his signature push has been trying to expand the Working Families Tax Credit, and he’s written more than a hundred laws since 2019. And also, he was my former professor way back in the day at Hunter College, so very happy to have him here.

Andrew Gounardes: Great.

Tahra Hoops: Yeah, thanks for being here. So obviously, you represent a very diverse area of Brooklyn. It’s basically the full spectrum of the New York affordability story. So I would love to know what constituents are telling you right now and how it might differ from area to area.

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah. So I’m lucky that I get to represent 350,000 Brooklynites in the State Senate, spanning from Bay Ridge down in the south where I was born and raised and where I live now with my wife and my three kids, all the way up to Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO and Vinegar Hill, and including a wide swath of the very, very diverse socioeconomic trends that are rippling across the city.

And I think that we keep saying that affordability is a top concern for so many people, and it really is true, but it really hits people in different ways. We see this in my office constantly based on the phone calls we get from constituents asking for help. And the things that we hear the most about from people are, of course, housing, because housing is perpetually in New York a challenge.

But even with housing, it depends neighborhood by neighborhood what types of phone calls we get from people. We hear a lot about housing. We hear a lot about childcare, and a lot of excitement around this push for universal childcare, but just a lot of people struggling to figure out how they can solve their own childcare needs while we build out a full universal system.

We hear about energy costs quite a bit, and just the overall everyday cost of things like food and school supplies and utility bills, which have been skyrocketing here in New York and everywhere across the country. So it really runs the gamut, I would say, across the board. People are feeling the pinch in their pockets and in their wallets, and it’s been like this for quite some time. This is not a new phenomenon that we’ve all of a sudden just discovered. This has been going on for years.

The diagnosis Democrats skipped

Gary Winslett: So you mentioned that it’s been going on for years because, so Democrats have been talking a lot about affordability in the last year or two, but you’ve been on this beat for a while. And so I’m just curious, what do you think Democrats maybe, maybe not right now, but in the past got wrong in terms of how they talk about affordability?

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah. So for me, this has been a primary focus. And one of the reasons why is because, and every office operates differently, but every night I get a summary of every call that comes into our office, and it’s organized by what they’re calling about and a summary of what the issue is.

So I can see in almost real time, at least on a daily basis, we had 15 phone calls today about food security. We had six phone calls about landlord-tenant disputes. We had eight phone calls about utility, unable to afford their heating bill or their cooling bill or whatever. And so I get this data pretty regularly, and so I had a good sense as to where people are feeling the biggest challenges in their life.

And what I think we have missed the mark on, everyone is using affordability as a watchword today because it’s been poll tested, it’s buzzy, it’s passed every focus group. Everyone’s talking about it. Tattoo it on your forehead. It’s like the word to say. But what I think we’ve gotten wrong is a more honest diagnosis, A, about the depth and the severity of the problem, and B, the multiple factors contributing to the causes as well as potential solutions.

I think when politicians talk, they like to identify a problem, and then they have the solution for it. The one solution. So whatever idea is theirs, either they created it or it’s part of their ideological worldview, but that’s the only solution for that particular problem. And that’s just not true, and that doesn’t always accurately capture an honest diagnosis as to what the real underlying problem is.

Your utility bills are too high, so are mine. Why are they too high? And so let’s deconstruct that. Let’s figure out what are the number of tools we can deploy to solve that problem. Your housing is too expensive. My housing is too expensive. Is it because your landlord is illegally raising your rent, and that’s a problem? Is it because you can make your ends meet, but your head’s barely above water? That’s a different problem. Is it because you’re trying to save money to maybe buy an apartment, right, a starter apartment? That’s a different problem. We have to do a better job, I think, at looking at the full field of what people are experiencing, and then come to the table with a whole array of ideas and options to try to help solve for them.

The Working Families Tax Credit, written on a napkin

Tahra Hoops: I’m glad that you were looking at the different causes that could happen, because a lot of the times when people are in such a massive crunch, they just try to get through to the next paycheck. And we shouldn’t want that to be the standard of living. It shouldn’t just have to be to just survive paycheck to paycheck.

We want everyone to have a standard basis where they feel comfortable. And a lot of studies have shown that putting money back in families’ pockets, not just benefits where they could only use it to redeem food or so forth, like actual money, people have been very responsible in using it for necessities. And because they don’t have to worry about their necessities, they are able to now build themselves out and create more economic opportunities for themselves.

And that’s why I wanted to talk about what I mentioned previously, the Working Families Tax Credit that you mentioned. I would love to know what it does differently from existing patchworks. How does a quarterly payout work? And just give us an overall feel for it in case people might not be aware of it.

Andrew Gounardes: Sure. So the Working Families Tax Credit is a proposal that I put together basically on the back of a napkin. When I was up in Albany, I had some downtime, and I saw some early studies about the overwhelming success of the pandemic-era expansion of the federal child tax credit. We bumped up the credit to like $3,600 temporarily, and we paid out half of the value of that credit in a six-month prepayment, month by month, so that families didn’t have to wait until tax time in order to get that money back.

They had money sitting in their accounts that they could use to spend on their everyday necessities and their essentials. And studies show that 93% of that money was spent on everyday essentials, which proves the point that you just made, Tahra, that families, if they have access to resources, can provide for themselves.

The success of that credit was so phenomenal that we cut the federal child poverty rate by 50% in this country, which is staggering. And of course, as soon as that money dried up, the rates went right back up, and families were right back in the same boat as they were before. And so I thought, “How can we replicate that success here in New York?”

And I came up with the Working Families Tax Credit. Same idea, not as generous as the federal government because we have fewer resources, but the overall goal is to give every child up to $1,600 per year, paid out quarterly, so that their families can use that money to be able to pay for their essentials.

Maybe it’s food on the table, maybe it’s the utility bill, maybe it’s school supplies, which have seen significant cost increases over the last couple of years, new clothes. God forbid the family wants to go to the zoo together, and the zoo costs money, right? They wanna go see a show together. They wanna do something as a family, which they absolutely should be able to afford to do, anywhere, and particularly here in New York City, where we have all this rich culture everywhere around us.

That was really the idea behind it. And so that was the starting point. It’s very expensive to do that, and so I thought, “Okay, well, how can we actually do this in a cost-effective way?” And it turns out New York has a bunch of overlapping tax credits and refunds and other things baked into the books for people of various income levels. I said, “What if we streamlined all of that into this one omnibus tax credit so that we don’t have to put more money into it? We can use the existing resources we are currently trying to use to support families, but do so in a more streamlined and effective way, and then package that as the new Working Families Tax Credit.”

So that was the proposal. Unfortunately, we never got it enacted, because budgets have been tough, and there is a fiscal attachment to it. But I’m incredibly proud to say that we’ve had two significant wins over the course of the life of this campaign. The first is that the Empire State Child Credit excluded children under the age of four from being included. So if you were zero, one, two, or three, your parents couldn’t claim that tax credit.

Gary Winslett: Why was that? That doesn’t...

Andrew Gounardes: They did it as a cost savings measure when they first, New York was the first state to adopt a child-based child tax credit in 2004, and like lots of budgeting conversations, they said, “Well, we can’t afford all of it. How do we compromise and do some of it?” They said, “Okay, well, let’s cut out kids zero to four, because kids can get more expensive as they get older.” As the father of three kids now, if they get more expensive when they get older, I don’t even wanna think what that’s gonna look like, because...

Gary Winslett: That’s all I...

Andrew Gounardes: They’re pretty expensive right now.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, I know. I don’t have three, I got one, but I can tell you one is expensive, so I don’t...

Andrew Gounardes: Right? Diapers add up, let me tell you something. Wipes add up. So they excluded kids under the age of four. We closed that gap so that now several hundred thousand more kids would be able, their families could get an additional $330 back in their pocket, which was the value of the child credit up until two years ago.

And then two years ago, again, while we were pushing for the full Working Families Tax Credit, we successfully increased the overall tax credit amount to $500, so up from 330 to $500 per child. And for children under the age of four, who until three years ago were completely excluded, we increased the value of their credit to $1,000.

So now parents can claim up to $1,000 per child for every child under the age of four, and then up to $500 per child for every child aged four to 17, which is real money back in their pockets. Now, it’s not the full thing we’ve been pushing for. We’re still trying to do the quarterly payments. But we’ve made progress to try to put more money back in people’s pockets, which is the ultimate goal we want, because we want families to be able to buy their necessities like they have been in the past.

Incrementalism, Bobby Kennedy, and moving the ball

Gary Winslett: Can I just say how much I appreciate the pragmatism of that? Because so often I’ll hear people in politics act like anything short of revolution is pointless. And it’s not. Incrementalism gets a bad rap, but when you’re making steps forward, that’s good. So I just wanted to say I really appreciate the fact that while you were aiming at something bigger, you were willing to also just get the wins you could right now.

Andrew Gounardes: Thank you for saying that. There’s a quote that I believe in that we kind of as the office, one of our office mantras, and it’s a quote by Bobby Kennedy. So it’s funny you mentioned pragmatism versus idealism, because he is like the ultimate idealist for many of us who believe in the power of government.

And he was paraphrasing Albert Camus. So basically what he said was, “We may never live in a world where there are no hungry children, but we can live in a world where fewer children go hungry. And if you won’t help us, who will?” Right? So just that. We wanna eradicate child poverty. New York, three of the top 10 cities in this country for child poverty rates are right here in New York: Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester.

Abysmal. City of Syracuse, 50% of children in the city of Syracuse live in abject poverty like you can’t even imagine. We might not be able to help every single kid in this state, though we want to, and we aspire to, and we’ll work tirelessly to do it, but if we can make it easier for families, even some families, to feed their kids, why wouldn’t we do that while we keep committing ourselves to the broader goal?

And that’s something that we think about all the time in my office, that I really believe in, and that’s how we’re able, I think, to notch these wins that help us move the ball down the field, sometimes inches, sometimes yards, but that’s how I think you can make a difference.

Why blue states keep losing people

Gary Winslett: Yeah. It’s funny you mention Upstate New York. Because I’ve been there, and I live in Vermont, I sort of see the population stagnation and decline in some of these places. New York loses more residents to other states than almost anywhere else. Texas and the Sun Belt, they’re building. New York really isn’t in comparison. Do you think that’s an indictment of sorts on blue state governance, that we keep losing people and it’s redder states in the South and Sun Belt that keep gaining people?

Andrew Gounardes: I think it’s partially yes. I think we have for a long time, government has been calcified, and we just do the same thing over and over and over again because that’s what they did before, and no one had any incentive to really think we should do anything differently. And so I think part of the problem facing blue states like New York is that we’ve been too calcified for too long.

We’ve been wedded in our ways for too long. We haven’t done the analysis of what is the right diagnosis for the problems we’re facing. And I think you see that in real ways, a lack of ability to build, right? Build housing in particular. We’ve started to turn that ship around a little bit, but nowhere nearly as far as other states have in terms of making it easier to build.

We haven’t thought about what is the right type of economic development model for some of these Rust Belt communities like parts of New York, right, that used to be heavily manufacturing, used to be heavily industrialized, especially some of these cities. We’ve never recovered from the loss of the factory, the loss of the big flagship company pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere or just shutting down.

And I think we have to give that a lot more creative thought and think about what are the new industries and ideas we can be incentivizing to come here, and how do we marry those two things together? How do we make an upstate community a place that’s attractive for someone to wanna put stakes in the ground and invest, attract that entrepreneurship, attract that level of investment, but then also make it easy for them to be able to buy a place they wanna live in and they wanna raise a family in?

So I think it’s twofold. And I think we’re starting to reckon with that. It’s still very slow, but it’s an urgent crisis, and it’s a political crisis, I would argue, because the longer we delay in addressing this, we lose population. That’s one thing. We lose congressional representation. That’s a whole other thing. That’s the ballgame, right? If Texas is gaining five members of the House in the next census, that’s five fewer seats that states like New York can have a voice in Washington advocating on our behalf, and that’s where you see a true loss of political power.

Housing, Gowanus, and the neighborhood that changed

Tahra Hoops: I do think that’s a point that definitely needs to be underscored more, because to me, the failure to build housing is almost a morality issue. Everyone needs shelter. It is the biggest line item in everyone’s budget. But people don’t understand, when the census happens and when we lose votes in the Electoral College, it’s going to be 10 times harder for us to govern.

We’re right now living at a time where Republicans have a majority, and we have seen at the federal level how much that is impacting millions of people across the board, especially from the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill. It’s shown now, in the upcoming school year, millions of kids are not going to be able to get free school lunch anymore because of that. And while other people on the right might frame it as a freeloader situation, they forget, kids are the ones that are on top of it.

But I’m glad you brought up the manufacturing aspect of it and how we’re still rebuilding of that because I think Brooklyn is a great example of it. I grew up in like Ridgewood, Bushwick, off Myrtle Avenue. And when I was a kid to how it is now, it is two completely different areas. And I actually think Brooklyn in certain parts have done such a great job at being able to get up new buildings quite quickly.

And some people, fringe voices, will say they’re pretty upset because it’s changed the character of their neighborhood. It’s not the place that they grew up in, but you should want the place that you live in to evolve with you. I’m glad it doesn’t look the same as to where I grew up in. I grew up in pretty bad poverty. It was not a nice and safe area to be in. And now I remember back when I was in Hunter, all my friends who were coming from out of state, they were like, “Oh, I just got a crazy new place in Bushwick. It’s such a nice area.” I was like, “Wait, you guys are moving there? This is crazy to me.” So it was so fun to see that happen, and it shows how housing policy could change so many different parts around you, from the economic status to the cultural status as well.

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah, absolutely. And look, I think there’s a way to protect people who feel anxious about seeing new developments when they themselves are struggling, and the question is new housing, but for whom? There’s a way to protect those people and do things thoughtfully without hindering development.

A couple of years ago, there was a massive rezoning in my district in Gowanus that would allow for 8,000 new units of housing, 40% of which would be deeply affordable, which is incredible. As part of that analysis, we heard a lot of opposition. Oh, it’s gonna gentrify. Oh, it’s gonna lessen the diversity of the community.

There was, the first time ever, the city undertook a racial analysis of what the rezoning could mean in terms of displacement, and then that analysis fed into the affordability requirements that were mandated as part of that rezoning, as well as additional commitments that the city made to invest in the nearby public housing stock, to address some of the inequities in the school infrastructure in the community, and all the other things that have been neglected for too long, using the development as a catalyst to try to right some of those wrongs, while still allowing 8,000 units of housing to be built.

My office is in Gowanus. We are right in the middle of that rezoning. I have seen these buildings go up around my window in such remarkable speed, while also making sure that we are protecting tenants and giving people who have stuck it out, basically, not giving them the shove out the door.

And so you can do both. We can do both at scale and we absolutely have to, because the consequences of not are just, I think, really bad. And one of my favorite fights to get into with people who oppose housing, “Oh, the neighborhood’s getting too expensive. My kids can’t afford to live here.” Okay, what do you think about the new housing plan for the neighborhood? “Oh, it’s terrible. We can’t build housing here.” Then what about your kids? Where are they gonna go? It’s like they don’t see how those things are related to each other. And when you point that out, then the light bulbs click on, and it’s like, “Oh, I get it now.” And I think that’s how we could actually change this conversation a little bit, too.

Universal childcare and how to pay for it

Gary Winslett: Earlier you had brought up the childcare, so I wanted to also ask you about that, because that’s another thing that’s really expensive. I have a seven-year-old. Back when she was in daycare, before kindergarten, that was expensive. That was a big budget line item for us. Anybody who’s gotta pay for childcare, they’ll tell you how much it is.

And I know you’ve called for universal childcare, and you’ve criticized the New York budget for not fully funding universal pre-K. And so what I’d love to ask you about is, what do you think is the path to get there? How do you make this fight over the childcare dependent credit, or whatever it is, how do you actually get to that place where universal pre-K is fully funded and we’ve got universal childcare?

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah. So I think this is a defining issue for so many families, and it’s a great example of how things used to be 30 years ago bear no relation to how they are today. So how Tahra grew up, right, in her neighborhood bears no relation to what her neighborhood is like today. Childcare is another example of that.

So our previous generation, like my parents’ generation, did not even think that universal childcare was necessary because there was a support network. You could survive and raise a family on one income, and you had a caregiver at home, and all of those factors, for the most part, that just does not exist for the vast majority of people today.

In New York State, this past budget cycle, we have now fully committed to universal pre-K for every single student in the state of New York. New York City has had that for several years. Other parts of the state were mostly there. That is now an ironclad commitment. We now have guaranteed 3-K for every New York City three-year-old.

We now are gonna work on trying to expand that statewide in the next year or two to come, and we are also working at the same time towards universal childcare, where the city of New York just rolled out a pilot program with state investment for 2,000, we call them 2-Care seats, so it’s not 3-K, it’s 2-Care, for children six months to two years old. Two thousand of those seats are being created for this fall, in specific ZIP codes that have the highest need.

Nearly 6,000 families applied, so about a third of them got admission. It shows the demand’s there. We’re gonna build on that by funding more seats and then rolling out this pilot to other counties across the state. Three other counties in New York are also participating in this. But at the end of the day, we have a plan, we have a roadmap.

At the end of the day, it’s gonna take money. We have to make sure that you can pay for the infrastructure to build these classrooms, right? It’s not just throw a throw rug on the floor and put a squishy toy and that’s it. You have to have the right infrastructure for these classrooms. You have to pay the providers a living wage so that they can actually, they’re gonna be wiping your kids’ diapers, you want them to get paid more than just minimum wage to do that, and to raise your kids, to spend eight hours with your kids every single day. It takes resources.

New York State has a budget of $260 billion. Maybe, I think we’re at 270 now. It’s a lot of money. It’s gonna cost several billion dollars more to fully fund universal childcare. I think that we have the roadmap. The funding comes from a combination of raising revenue smartly, but also more smartly using the revenue we currently have. I don’t think anyone can say with a straight face that we are getting $270 billion worth of state government for the budget that we spend.

And that is equally as true as the fact that we have people in the state of New York and businesses in the state of New York who are certainly not carrying their fair load of what a progressive tax structure could be and should be. We have corporations headquartered here that have billions in earnings that have paid zero in federal corporate taxes and zero in state corporate taxes. So we have to do both in order to raise the revenue to then fully fund the roadmap that we’ve clearly laid out, which I think is the right path to be on.

Supply is the childcare problem too

Tahra Hoops: I think it’s good to note that when it comes to childcare, like in other sections of policy, like, as we just talked about, housing, supply will always be such a major part of that. And in the future, as innovation progresses, some things can get automated, but when it comes to childcare, you are never going to allow your child to be taken care of by a robot. You do need humans. Human care will always matter so much.

So it is important that we are investing now for the kids of tomorrow, for the future families of tomorrow, so that whenever they have a family... And also this really does affect women overwhelmingly. In the future, whenever I do have a kid, I don’t want to look at the cost of childcare and look at how much I make and feel like I am getting pushed out of the workforce, and that is the case for many people.

I grew up with a homemaker because my mother looked at the job prospect that she was going to get, realized she had five kids at home and it was like, it would be silly of her to even think to waste money on childcare and so forth when her pay would not add up to that. So ensuring that we can expand more daycares out there.

There have been some new reforms that are small, but I think are helpful, that have been adopted in some states. For example, allowing childcare centers on upper floors. Right now they’re only zoned for the bottom floor, and that leads to such a scarce supply of where we can have. Just shifting that over while making sure the safety codes are there does expand the supply and it opens up new jobs for childcare workers. So having us get creative now, so that future families don’t feel like they have to choose between the workforce or their family and it’s a choice they want, is definitely something that is worthwhile to discuss.

Rapid response

Tahra Hoops: We’re going to hit the last couple of minutes, and we always like to end with kind of a rapid response. These are very lighthearted. Don’t take them super seriously. Whatever comes to your mind. One of the first questions we like to ask is something that you think is too expensive, and you can’t name any of the basic things we just talked about because we know those are expensive.

Andrew Gounardes: Good quality gourmet ice cream.

Tahra Hoops: Oh, like gelato?

Andrew Gounardes: Gelato like Van Leeuwen or Alden’s, and it’s like $9 now for a tub in my supermarket. I can’t spend nine... I am an ice cream addict. I can’t spend $9 a tub. I can’t justify that. I started making ice cream at home with my kids. I don’t wanna be like a homesteader making ice cream because I can’t afford the...

Tahra Hoops: Churning butter.

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah.

Gary Winslett: Turn it. That’s awesome. And what’s something that you think is fascinating about your district that people don’t know about?

Andrew Gounardes: What’s fascinating about my district, the entirety of the Battle of Brooklyn basically took place in my district, which we’re celebrating this month, the 250th anniversary of. And the first armed resistance by local patriots began in my neighborhood of Bay Ridge, where they fired a cannon on the British ships in New York Harbor, back in the beginning of August, 1776. So as a history nerd, I think that’s pretty cool, particularly in light of this year’s 250th celebration.

Tahra Hoops: No, I think that’s a good one. And Gary’s smiling because he is a major history nerd. You have to talk about your previous job that you held back in the day.

Gary Winslett: Don’t take it personally as a New Yorker, but I’m a Boston guy. I lived in Boston for seven years, and before I went to grad school, I actually did those Freedom Trail tours in 1770s getup and everything. Yeah, that was one of my part-time jobs during the recession, was doing those.

Tahra Hoops: More the wig.

Andrew Gounardes: You know what? At one point in my life, I was looking up jobs to be a tour guide at Gettysburg as the National Park Service, because I’m with you there. We’re on the same wavelength. That would be very cool. It’s my retirement plan.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, that’d be great.

Tahra Hoops: This is actually a good question, and always interesting for our viewers to hear. What was your first job? So people can understand, “Oh, I was maybe a clerk back then at the grocery store,” and you could end up being a state senator one day. So yeah, interesting to know that.

Andrew Gounardes: I was a paper filer for a family friend’s insurance company, my first summer job. My job was file papers in their basement all summer.

Gary Winslett: Wow.

Tahra Hoops: I remember turning 14, which is the first time you can legally be allowed to have a job back in New York City, going to my guidance counselor’s office when it was summertime and looking to get a job, and it was the most exciting time ever. And I look back now, I’m like, “Why did you wanna work so bad?”

Andrew Gounardes: It was exciting. You had to sign your working papers, and it was a whole big thing to get your working papers filled out when you turned 14. What a time. That was only a couple years ago for me, so, you know.

Tahra Hoops: Oh yeah, it was last year for me too. Yeah, when you talk about when you were my professor back in undergrad, that was last year, not several years ago at this point. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for being able to join us. Really appreciate this conversation.

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah, this was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, thanks for coming on.

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