Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani: Good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure and a privilege to spend Easter Sunday with you. I want to thank Pastor Rich [and] First Lady Yanique for inviting me to join you on this joyful holiday. And I want to say thank you to everyone here at Bronx Bethany Church of the Nazarene for welcoming me into your sacred space of worship. This congregation, the community of people who make it what it is, you have been the cornerstone of Wakefield for more than 60 years. I know it has been a journey for this congregation just as it has been a journey for our city. I want to wish you all a Happy Easter.
Across the five boroughs, the people of our city are marking this holy day with the color and vibrancy that New Yorkers bring to everything that we do. There will be singing, sky-high bonnets, strolls through the park, egg hunts and potato salad. It is a time of renewal. And we feel that renewal not only in the warming air and the cherry blossoms that are soon to bloom but also in our souls as we reflect on the path that Jesus walked with the heaviness of the cross affixed to his back, his burial, and three days later, his resurrection.
In 1959, Dr. King delivered an Easter sermon in Montgomery, Alabama, titled “A Walk Through the Holy Land.” He spoke of his trip through Jerusalem with his wife Coretta, their flight over Damascus, and their time walking the narrow, winding paths of the old city. He spoke of the tragedies of man and the parallels he saw between the path that Jesus walked on Good Friday and the afflictions of our modern era. Dr. King told his congregants, “We've been buried in numerous graves: the grave of economic insecurity, the grave of exploitation [and] the grave of oppression.”
We've watched justice trampled over and truth crucified. Still, Dr. King reminds us, Jesus was guided by his faith in something he could not see. Despite incredible darkness, Jesus was buoyed by this faith, a belief in things unseen. And Dr. King said, “Easter reminds us it won't always be like that. It reminds us that God has a light that can shine amid all the darkness.” And faith — I know so many here are watching us in this room, in the overflow room and online. I know it has guided so many through moments of hardship, [and] moments of loneliness. Faith, it is nothing less than light in the darkness. It is a light that moved Dr. King to tears when he visited Calvary. That site of Jesus' crucifixion so many years ago. And I share these words with you because I think of Dr. King's words often when I reflect on this time of renewal in our city.
For far too long, we have only known darkness. For far too long, the people of this city have shunned their light outward through art, wisdom [and] good deeds, only to find themselves being met with darkness in return. For working people, life in our city has grown into a heavy burden. Costs have soared. Neighborhoods have been left hollow. And it is not a weight that has been borne evenly. In just the past few decades alone, 200,000 Black New Yorkers have been forced to leave New York City because they cannot afford a dignified life here. Yet, we know that life in this city need not only be defined by adversity or by resilience.
It can be defined by dignity, by solidarity, by a government that shines the light back on the people who showed us what it was. And that is why we have sought to use every single lever we have at City Hall to deliver more of that lightness and ease to the working people of our city. I have now been your Mayor for a little less than 100 days. And on the eighth day of our administration, we secured a $1.2 billion agreement with the governor of our state to deliver universal child care in this city.
And we did so, frankly, because we had heard from New Yorkers who were tired that the happiest moment of their lives, the arrival of a child, so often came with the realization that they could not afford to raise that child in the same place that they knew as their home. It came with the realization that they may have to quit their jobs. They may have to leave that neighborhood because they could not afford $20,000 a year per child. And so, what we will do now is deliver free child care for two-year-olds in this city. 2,000 this year, 12,000 next year, and then every two-year-old by the end of four years.
And we do that not just for parents, but also so that New Yorkers know that the future can be something to be looked at [not] just with and anxiety, but also with hope and expectation, with lightness. And as we build out universal child care, we also seek to do so while delivering more housing in this city, because it has become too expensive to call this place our home. We know that we need to build more housing that is not just affordable to rent but also affordable to own.
And so, we are streamlining the production of hundreds of homes across [the] Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. And what we will do is we will do this while also making it easier for homeowners to keep the homes that they have today. Because what I found when coming into office is our city had a policy called the tax lien sale, which disproportionately pushed Black and brown homeowners out of this city. And so, we made a decision we were going to pause that sale for six months and do a full investigation to find out an equitable way that we could keep New Yorkers in their homes while keeping the city on the right path.
And the last thing I will say [to] you is that often I have found in our city that darkness thrives and arrives when working people are pitted against one another, when we are told we must make a choice between workers and small businesses. But in fact, what we have found is that both workers and small businesses have been getting exploited. And so, what we have done is we have used our Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to deliver nearly $100,000 a day, every day I've been in office, back into the pockets of those workers and small businesses. Now, this is all done because we know there will be challenges ahead just as there are challenges now.
And standing before you, I think of these sage words: whatever you are going through right now, there is a different existence. There is a bigger call. There is a deeper faith. Now Pastor Rich is a wise man, and he's right. These are the words he shared with us just from right here, not too long ago. Because Easter reminds us that what seems impossible is anything but. When we dig into our deeper reserves of faith, a different existence is possible. So, I come here today with the hope that we continue to step toward that different existence and, in so doing, that we move away from the darkness and into the season of light. Thank you so much. Happy Easter.
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