Daniel Garodnick

Daniel R. Garodnick
Member of the New York City Council from the 4th District
Incumbent
Assumed office January 2006
Preceded by	Eva Moskowitz
Constituency	Manhattan: Upper East Side, Central Park South, Grand Central, Tudor City, Waterside, Peter Cooper Village, Carnegie Hill, Stuyvesant Town, United Nations; part of Yorkville, Turtle Bay
Personal details
Born	May 5, 1972 (1972-05-05) (age 39) Manhattan, New York
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Zoe L. Segal-Reichlin
Alma mater	Dartmouth College University of Pennsylvania Law School
Profession	lawyer, politician
Website	NYC Council: District 4

Daniel R. "Dan" Garodnick (born May 5, 1972) is a New York City Councilman representing Manhattan’s 4th District since 2006.

Biography

Prior to running for elected office, Garodnick was a litigation associate at the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. While there, he represented the Partnership for New York City in the successful Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit seeking higher standards and equitable funding for public school students. He also represented a family that lost a member in the attack of September 11, 2001, defended a Living Wage Ordinance in the City of St. Louis, Missouri and represented 13 same-sex couples seeking the right to marry in New York State. Prior to joining the firm, he served as a law clerk to Judge Colleen McMahon of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Garodnick spent two years working for the New York Civil Rights Coalition as the director of a program to teach New York public school students non-violent ways to combat racial discrimination, and to use government to effect social change. He also sought and secured funding from Central Synagogue in New York to travel independently to Virginia and Georgia to help rebuild African-American churches burned in racially-motivated arsons in 1996.

Garodnick is a graduate of Trinity School (1990), where he was president of the student council and the model congress. Garodnick received his B.A. from Dartmouth College (1994^[1]) where he served as class president for each of his four years. He holds a J.D. from University of Pennsylvania Law School (2000^[2]), where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review.

In May 2008, Garodnick was married to Zoe L. Segal-Reichlin, an associate at the Manhattan law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.^[3]

City Council

Garodnick was elected to New York City Council in 2005, winning 63 percent of the vote in the general election and defeating Republican candidate Patrick Murphy as well as libertarian candidate Jak Jacob Karako. In the five-way Democratic Primary of that same year he won 59 percent of the vote on his way to defeating Jack Lester, Meryl Brodsky, George Spitz and Karako. Within the City Council, Garodnick serves on various committees, chairing that of Planning, Dispositions and Concessions.

The 4th District

Garodnick represents the 4th district, which comprises the Upper East Side, parts of midtown and Murray Hill, and Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.

Tenants' Rights

In 2007, Garodnick, along with Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn and Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito, introduced the Tenant Protection Act. The bill, signed into law by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in March, 2008, made harassment by landlords a violation of the housing code. It was the first city law to so protect tenants from harassment, which was viewed as a means to raise rents by driving residents out of rent stabilized apartments.^[4]

The Bid for Stuyvesant Town

The creation and preservation of affordable housing is a priority for Garodnick, which was most clearly demonstrated during the sale of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. In 2006, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company put up for sale the 110-building complex, which opened in 1947 to house soldiers returning home from World War II. Garodnick spearheaded a $4.5 tenant-backed bid to purchase Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village on behalf of the residents in order to preserve the properties’ historic affordability. Though Met Life ultimately sold the properties to Tishman Speyer in a highly leveraged deal for $5.4 billion, Garodnick’s effort earned the praise of the New York Times.^[5]

Aftermath and Tishman Speyer

After its purchase of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, Tishman Speyer moved to deny lease renewals to tenants it viewed as illegally possessing rent stabilized apartments. From 2006 to 2008, Tishman Speyer challenged tenants’ legal right to a lease renewal in approximately 870 cases. The landlord was successful in only half of the court cases it brought against tenants, supporting Garodnick’s claim that the practice was an overbroad challenge of residents’ legal rights in an attempt to force rent-stabilized apartments to market rate rents.^[6] In response to the ongoing pursuit, Garodnick established free, monthly legal clinics for tenants and set up a “tenant hotline” for residents to get legal help, and called for a moratorium on the challenging of lease renewals.

Infrastructure Task Force and Energy Policy

In the wake of a steam pipe explosion in midtown Manhattan, Garodnick was appointed by Council Speaker Quinn to co-chair the Council’s Infrastructure Task Force. In that role, Garodnick has advocated for infrastructure investments as a means of stimulating the economy, and explored measures to encourage the use of alternative energy.^[7] He coined the term “solar empowerment zones” to describe areas of the city where government should prioritize upgrades to the power grid and the removal of technical barriers to the expanded use of solar energy.^[8]

Garodnick authored New York City’s first green energy code to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, which are responsible for nearly 80 percent of New York’s carbon emissions.^[9] The bill would close a loophole in existing law that allows a building owner to replace inefficient equipment with more inefficient equipment when undertaking renovations to less than 50 percent of a building’s systems.

Committee assignments

Planning, Dispositions & Concessions (Chair) Cultural Affairs, Libraries & International Intergroup Relations Education Land Use Public Safety Rules, Privileges & Elections Standards & Ethics State & Federal Legislation Transportation ^[10]

References

1. ^ Campus Journal; Dartmouth Seeks Ethics for the Age of Computers. New York Times. January 5, 1994.
2. ^ Alumni Briefs. Penn Law Journal. Fall 2008.
3. ^ Weddings: Zoe L. Segal-Reichlin and Daniel R. Garodnick. New York Times. May 11, 2008.
4. ^ Groundbreaking Tenant Protection Act Becomes Law. New York City Council. March 13, 2008.
5. ^ [1]
6. ^ Stuyvesant Town Revenues Have Fallen, Report Says - NYTimes.com
7. ^ Rebuilding New York - July 1, 2008 - The New York Sun
8. ^ [2]
9. ^ PLANYC 2030 - Greener, Greater Buildings Plan
10. ^ [3]

External links

• New York City Council: District 4 - Daniel R. Garodnick
• Daniel R. Garodnick official page

Political offices
Preceded by Eva Moskowitz	New York City Council, 4th District 2006–present	Incumbent

Persondata
Name	Garodnick, Daniel
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	May 5, 1972
Place of birth	Manhattan, New York
Date of death
Place of death