NEW YORK — New York City might view itself as the center of the universe, but it is often treated as the neglected stepchild of presidential politics — it’s been decades since a competitive presidential primary has been waged here.

Now, thanks to a contentious Democratic April 19 primary where Bernie Sanders is bringing a feisty challenge to Hillary Clinton on her adopted home turf, local lawmakers and advocates are seizing on a rare opportunity to force the candidates to talk about big-city problems that have been overlooked in the yearlong presidential slog: housing and urban policy.


“Housing has not been any part of the presidential campaign,” said Brad Lander, a leading progressive voice on the New York City Council, who represents South Brooklyn, where both campaigns have set up their offices. “[The] federal government has withdrawn from affordable housing. There’s been no new Section 8 certificates in years. There’s no senior housing, there’s not an ambitious national housing trust fund — and yet we’ve heard almost nothing from the candidates on this.”

Some New York City politicians and advocates have come up with a buzzy idea for how to spark a discussion about some of the most pressing issues confronting the biggest city in America: Send Sanders and Clinton to visit the projects.

Neither candidate has accepted the open invitation to tour a public housing facility here yet. But there is growing pressure from local lawmakers for the two Democrats to begin talking about the problems of the urban poor — a focus that’s expected to get some play in the April 14 debate in Brooklyn, as well.

Affordable housing has been the hottest topic in the local political conversation since Bill de Blasio was elected mayor in 2014 on the mantra of ending a “tale of two cities,” one for the rich and another for the poor.

Lander is part of a coalition of elected officials and advocacy groups planning to force urban issues into Clinton’s and Sanders’ stump speeches and campaign promises while they make their way across the five boroughs. Working with Lander is Ritchie Torres, 28, the youngest member of the City Council, who himself grew up in public housing in the Bronx.

Torres said he is not supporting either candidate. But he met with Sanders last week before the senator’s18,500-person rally in the Bronx. “I told him that there are $17 billion in capital needs for NYCHA [the New York City Housing Authority],” he said. “When I brought up the number, Sen. Sanders was taken aback. He said, ‘Is that billion with a B?’ Neither Clinton or Sanders has engaged in a full conversation about the affordability crisis and cities.

“There’s been no discussion of the urban poor, no discussion of the affordability crisis or public housing, or Section 8 in this election,” added Torres.

The advocacy group Community Voices Heard, which represents 2.2 million low-income families across the state, has formally invited Clinton and Sanders to take a tour of a public housing facility before the April 19 New York primary. Torres said he and other elected officials plan to partner with the group to increase the pressure on the candidates to participate and see the ailing infrastructure firsthand — like the broken elevator in a Bronx public housing building that killed an 84-year-old man last year.

The photo-op “would serve to bring attention to an issue, the state of public housing in the United States, which has received little, if any, attention during this presidential primary season,” the group’s executive director, Sondra Youdelman, wrote in a letter to the candidates, which also noted NYCHA’s $17 billion capital deficit over the next 10 years.

The campaigns told POLITICO they are still sorting out their schedules for the next two weeks.

Clinton officials dispute the idea that they have overlooked urban America. On her website, Clinton proposes $125 billion in economic revitalization funds, with a focus on jobs, infrastructure and housing, that would be paid for through a tax on Wall Street. That figure includes $25 billion for a housing investment program designed in part to help build more affordable rental housing near jobs and schools, and represents an increase in funding from the current administration.

But the issue is rarely a top line in Clinton’s stump speech, where she more often focuses on building on Obamacare, fighting climate change and, when her attention turns to an urban agenda, instituting criminal justice reform.

Sanders addresses how to improve the rural economy on his website, but he has no plans online that address the problems of an urban economy. Some local progressive leaders pointed back to Sanders’ record in Vermont to prove he understands the needs of cities. Sanders, they said, is generally credited with setting up and funding a community land trust when he was mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, a program that has since become a national model.

Cities have long been overlooked in presidential elections, where the primary campaign trail tends to lead candidates from the plains of Iowa to New Hampshire town halls to the small-town South. Big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago often serve only as fundraising pit stops along the way.

In 1996, New York University urban policy professor Mitchell Moss wrote that “like suburbanites who commute to high-income jobs in downtown offices, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole treat cities as places to raise money, not as centers of commerce and culture with physical and human needs.” The newspaper column was entered into the congressional record by New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

In an interview, Moss said not much has changed in over two decades. “This election is about national economic issues,” he said. “This has been a big campaign tied to national things, like trade and immigration, with an occasional effort to deal with foreign policy. The cities that have received attention, like Baltimore and St. Louis, have for the problems that have occurred in them, but not for the condition of cities generally.”

But Moss credited Clinton with a better understanding of the need for federal funds to help cities — which she proved during her advocacy for the city in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Lower Manhattan — and dismissed Sanders as lacking an understanding of urban America.

“The Clinton campaign has to tell the truth — that Sanders is a rural know-nothing,” Moss said. “Vermont is filled with people who can’t make it anywhere — the skiers, the potheads and the people who tap maple trees. Hillary should challenge Bernie on his understanding of urban issues because he would fail.”

Bill Lipton, New York director of the Working Families Party, said that sells Sanders’ record short.

“From the need for a $15 minimum wage, to the need to end police violence against people of color and the devastating impact of ‘free trade’ agreements, no one has has been a more consistent, forceful voice on issues of inequality and political corruption that impact our cities than Bernie Sanders,” he said.

On the Republican side of the aisle, New York’s biggest star turn came courtesy of Ted Cruz, who denigrated “New York values” during a debate in January. The remark inspired the city’s business leaders, not just the community activists and progressive lawmakers, to try and change the way New York is portrayed in this election.

“The attack on New York City and its culture by Ted Cruz certainly raised an urban issue,” said Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business organization. “That has made us think about how we position and promote New York and urban centers in a more constructive way throughout the campaign.”

Wylde, whose organization represents some of the Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs that have become targets in this campaign, said she is trying to make Wall Street a positive urban issue, too. “We want to make sure that New York and Wall Street are not simply negative punch lines,” she said, “but that our leaders are armed with facts about the importance of our key industries for the entire country. That is something we’re raising with elected officials.”

