George Latimer's long record: Racist housing policy, school privatization, big money from the IDC
Latimer, running against Rep. Jamaal Bowman, has been in office for nearly 40 years.
It’s odd that no mainstream political media bothered to dig into George Latimer’s nearly 40-year record in office and public life. It shouldn’t have required an independent reporter to assemble the below in a coherent story, but that’s the norm now, so please support this journalism to make this stuff possible. It’s free!
In 2015, HBO ran a three-part miniseries about the turbulent racial politics of Yonkers, a city of roughly 200,000 people just north of New York City. Show Me a Hero, created by The Wire’s David Simon, follows the first few years after a federal judge hit Yonkers with a desegregation order, which carried fines that began to bankrupt the city as bigoted constituents and city council members angrily resisted compliance.
Oscar Isaac won a Golden Globe for playing Mayor Nick Wasicsko, the reluctant and ultimately tragic hero of the series, who fought to build affordable housing units in a historically white neighborhood. The show concludes with Wasicsko’s death in 1993, but legal and political battles over housing discrimination roiled Yonkers for another three decades. Had HBO commissioned further seasons, it could have shifted focus to a Democratic lawmaker who took a far less courageous approach.
George Latimer was elected to the Westchester County Board of Legislators in 1991, having served in on the city council in the nearby town of Rye, a wealthier suburb. Now the Westchester County Executive, Latimer is now running for Congress in a bitter primary against incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman, touting what his campaign calls a record of supporting affordable housing. The truth is far messier and less flattering.
Yonkers, by far the largest city in Westchester, spent the ‘90s and 2000s working to comply with the federal housing order, which often meant building a few dozen affordable units on odd plots of land. On one occasion, Yonkers won bipartisan support for plans to put up 34 units of mixed-income housing on a 4.5-acre slice of a local park controlled by the county.
Westchester’s leaders were also behind the plan, but it ran into resistance from local residents and several legislators: George Latimer and a bunch of Republicans.
Latimer and his GOP colleagues voted to successfully block the release of the land, then demanded concessions, including a reduction in size of the parcel in Rory O’. Three legislators flipped their votes, giving the board the two-third majority needed to proceed with the deal. Latimer was not one of them — he voted against the deal once again.
Despite its passage, the project continued to get delayed, and in 2001, Latimer, at that time the chair of the county board, suggested suing Yonkers over a technicality that was already rejected by a court.
The bare minimum
In 2009, Westchester got hit with its own consent decree by the federal government, which found that the county had fostered racist housing policies. The county was ordered to force its towns to amend its exclusionary zoning laws and any other policies that put up barriers to fair housing opportunity.
Latimer took office as county executive a decade later, having weathered the awkwardness of having his own home placed in foreclosure because he refused to pay his mortgage. This experience did not seem to alter his beliefs about affordable housing; as county executive, Latimer was accused of slow-walking outstanding the consent decree’s outstanding items.
Under the decree, the county was instructed to sue any town that did not life its exclusionary zoning laws, but he allowed 14 municipalities to keep at least some in place, including his hometown of Rye.
Over the course of a dozen years, the county delivered just the minimum 750 units of affordable housing required in the decree and failed to place enough of the ones that were built in Westchester’s predominantly white, well-to-do towns.
A federal monitor who ultimately signed off on ending the decree after so many years was critical of the effort, though it was one that Latimer heralded as a major accomplishment.
“Building 750 units of affordable housing in a county of almost 1 million residents was not intended to be the end goal," the monitor wrote in his report. "But instead a runway for the county and its constituent municipalities to construct a process that enables the county to understand and address its affordable housing needs.”
Latimer’s campaign against Bowman has been marked by an array of strange and insensitive racial remarks, including accusations that Bowman only care about Black constituents and that he actually represents Dearborn, a predominantly Arab-American city outside of Detroit. Bowman has accused Latimer of race-baiting, while the former president of the local NAACP alleged that Latimer lied about a stomach virus so that he could bail out last minute on the organization’s June 5 candidate forum.
Siding with Republicans, again and again
When George Latimer was elected chair of the Westchester County Board of Legislators in 1999, he became the first Democrat to ever hold the position. Later, as a member of the state Senate, Latimer aligned himself with a group of lawmakers who denied Democrats the majority that voters had handed to them.
The Independent Democratic Conference was a group of legislators who were elected as Democrats but caucused with Republicans in exchange for plum committee assignments. Between its formation in 2011 and dissolution in 2018, the IDC was instrumental in handing Republicans a working majority in the upper chamber. Its leader, former state Sen. Jeff Klein, represented parts of Westchester County, making him a close ally — and generous financier — for Latimer’s campaigns.
Latimer never joined the IDC, but he aligned ideologically with both its members and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who supported the caucus. Both Klein and Latimer were were proponents of school privatization, no surprise for lawmakers from one of the wealthiest counties in the state.
Naturally, they both backed a GOP dream bill pushed by Cuomo that would have allowed individuals and corporations to divert three-quarters of their state income tax into donations for charter or private schools. It would have robbed New York of at least $100 million in revenue, and the same policy is now used by at least 21 states to help wealthy residents stack up deep tax cuts, draining the public education system.
(Incidentally, Latimer had a second house fall into foreclosure last fall, this one for tax delinquency. The trouble first became public in 2017, when Latimer was running for the top job in Westchester County, and by last October, the debt had reached $77,000 — including around $20,000 in unpaid school taxes.)
Democrats in the Assembly ultimately killed the bill to legalize the private school donation tax scheme, but Latimer’s work did not go unrewarded: The IDC took in hundreds of thousands of dollars from school privatization advocates, and in 2014 alone, it donated $40,000 to Latimer’s campaign.
It was a lot of money for a state legislative race, especially a decade ago. It also pales in comparison to the record $14.5 million that AIPAC, which is largely funded by conservative Republicans and ultra-wealthy donors, has poured into Latimer’s campaign for Congress this year.
The Democratic primary takes place on June 25th.
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