Meet The NYC City Council District 1 Candidates: Christopher Marte
Marte was among several District 1 candidates to share their platform at a forum hosted by NYU College Democrats ahead of the June 22 election.
NYU College Democrats hosted a Zoom forum with City Council District 1 candidates in March, which included seven of those in the running for the district’s soon-to-be-open seat — Susan Lee, Sean Hayes, Gigi Li, Jenny Low, Christopher Marte, Denny Salas, and Tiffany Winbush.
This year’s primary election, which will take place on June 22, is especially noteworthy; 35 out of 51 Council seats are open due to members terming out or not running for reelection. As a result, over 300 candidates are vying for seats across the city.
There are nine candidates in the running for District 1, according to a map by THE CITY, which was last updated May 5. Not in attendance at the forum were Maud Maron — who RSVP’d but cancelled earlier that day, according to an email sent to NYU College Democrats — and Susan Damplo.
One of the candidates in the running for District 1, which includes most of Lower Manhattan up to Washington Square Park, will take the place of current Democratic incumbent Margaret Chin, who has represented the district since 2010.
“The City Council controls many issues that have a profound impact on New Yorkers’ lives,” said moderator Mikey Lampel, NYU College Democrats’ Policy and Communications Director and a CAS senior studying Environmental Studies and Public Policy.
NYU Democrats members had several questions prepared; some could only be answered with a yes or no and others allowed for a minute-long response.
Today’s installment of Local’s “Meet The NYC City Council District 1 Candidates” series will focus on Christopher Marte and his stance on the city issues brought up during the forum.
Marte, who is the New York State Director at political training organization Arena, is a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised on the Lower East Side. There, his father owned a bodega, and he attended NYC public schools. He began a career in finance, but when his father’s bodega closed due to rent hikes, he decided to take action because “the community he loved get torn apart by luxury development and corrupt politicians,” according to his website. Before running for City Council in 2017, which he lost by only 200 votes, Marte co-founded two community gardens in NYCHA, volunteered at the Bowery Mission, and worked as a legal researcher at an immigration law firm.
Pandemic recovery
In tackling recovery, Marte wants to go two routes, the first being introducing a Green New Deal plan locally. “After Hurricane Sandy, we were given funds to rebuild our waterfront,” he said. “However, with the lack of political will and organization, we haven’t done that yet.”
Marte noted that this could create thousands of union jobs and help small businesses, since more people will be able to work in the area.
The second route: he wants to revamp how Small Business Services works as an agency. Marte thinks that doing so would help start a new generation of businesses in Lower Manhattan. “Right now, they barely even give guidance and advice to small businesses [that are] struggling,” Marte said. “They should be able to give out loans, help people start new businesses, and give all the training, especially to minority-owned businesses.
Housing and the SoHo/NoHo proposal
Regarding the SoHo/NoHo rezoning, which would add about 3,200 apartments to the two wealthy neighborhoods, Marte doesn’t support it because “it actually gives a loophole to developers to develop higher with actually no commitment to build affordable housing.”
He continued, “As we see throughout the city, our mayor allows developers to profit as much as they can without actually building affordable housing for the people that have lived in the community.” He also noted that the rezoning’s development, much of which would happen on Canal Street, would displace thousands of people that live in tenement buildings.
He supports the Chinatown Working Group Plan rezoning, which is community-led and will “help preserve residents to live in this community and also small businesses, because that’s something we also have to look at when we look at any of these rezonings’ displacement.”
Criminal justice reform and closing down Rikers Island
Marte is in favor of closing down Rikers before 2026, and wants to stop NYC from building new jails, including the plans to build one in Chinatown. “Right now there are less than 5,000 incarcerated individuals in our city — why are we going to spend $11 billion to build new jails?” Marte said. “We can tackle this issue head-on, give them the care, the job training, everything they need so that we could continue to decrease the incarceration rate.
He added that he believes by investing in communities of color, there is a way to stop new jails from being built. “I’m willing to take this challenge on because that’s what I’ve been working on for the past five years,” Marte said, mentioning his experience helping his brother, who was formerly imprisoned at Rikers, start a business help formerly incarcerated people and being a board chair at Defy Ventures, helping those individuals start their own businesses.
Bike routes, bus lanes, and open streets
Marte thinks that rather than the issue being just about protected bike lanes, it’s also about connected bike lanes — as of now, when bikers come out of the Williamsburg or Brooklyn Bridge, they run into traffic, so Marte says that having Prince and Spring Street be protected would help solve that issue. He also said that he wants Lafayette, Broadway, and Canal to have bike lanes.
Marte mentioned the FiDi pedestrianization plan, which would limit drivers in the area to five miles per hour, expand the Bowling Green plaza, and turn the Manhattan entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge into a plaza, according to Streetsblog. The Seaport Vision plan, which aims to revamp the area by providing economic stimulus and environmental resilience, was also brought up. “And so it’s having a vision of how to open these streets, but also getting community buy-in to make sure that we can actually get it implemented.”
NYC schools and desegregation
“I think the segregation doesn’t happen in high schools or middle schools, it actually happens in elementary schools,” Marte began. He noted that, education-wise, “our district is separated by District 1 and District 1…District 1is Chinatown and the Lower East Side, the community of color, while District 2 wraps around it from the Seaport to SoHo, NoHo, Tribeca, the West Village, all the way up to the Upper East Side.
Marte said that he’s been working with parents to eliminate these lines, and by getting rid of them, he thinks that would help end segregation in schools. “We don’t wait until middle school of high school, we have to tackle it early on, because by then the gap is so large that it’s really hard to catch up.”
Supports reducing the NYPD’s annual budget and shrinking the scope of its work? Yes.
Supports the City Council’s use of member deference for land use decisions? (With member deference, a Council member decides whether or not to vote yes or no on a proposal in their district and the rest of City Council follows.): Yes.
Supports staff unionization? Yes.
Supports the establishment of the 10 Wooster Street homeless shelter? Yes.
City Council elections are right around the corner, taking place in just a few months, so make sure to register to vote here. Young people can have an impact on who ends up winning the seat this June, and Lampel stressed the importance of getting involved and voting in local elections like this one.
“You see election after election, young people are the smallest block of voters to turn out, and that’s even more exacerbated with a lot of these weird local issues like Community Boards,” he said. “It is filled with people that aren’t actually representative of the population of an area.”
NYU College Democrats President David Gordon added that hearing where candidates like Marte stand on issues raised at the forum is particularly critical for NYU students. He said, “From the perspective of being future invested residents of New York City, this City Council race, as well as the whole of local elections, is really, really important.”
For more information on Marte and his platform, you can visit his website here.
