Each legislative session, the Progressive Caucus chooses and organizes in support of several priority bills and runs campaigns to include progressive measures in the City budget. Here are just a few of our recent wins.
Crisis to Care was the Progressive Caucus’s 2025 (FY26) budget campaign calling for investments to tackle the dual mental and public health crises that have long gone unaddressed in New York City. Crisis to Care won $80 million in critical investments, including $46 million to make mental health treatment teams permanent and $34 million in new funding.
You can read more about the Crisis to Care campaign and the items it won here.
Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit
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In late 2024, the New York City Council passed the FARE Act, championed by Council Member Chi Ossé and his fellow Progressive Caucus members. The FARE Act prohibits landlords from passing the fees of brokers they hire onto prospective tenants, which can double or triple the costs for tenants moving to a new apartment. Since June 11, 2025, tenants, tenants are no longer be forced to pay expensive broker fees for realtors they didn’t hire!
Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit
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New York City has some of the best parks, shopping centers, and public spaces in the world but it’s low in one of the most important ingredients of a safe and equitable city - clean, free, and abundant public bathrooms. These bills sponsored by Progressive Caucus Members Sandy Nurse and Rita Joseph require City departments to develop a citywide public bathroom network with 1 bathroom per 2,000 residents by 2035 and to regularly report on their progress towards increasing the number of public bathrooms.
Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit
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The City Council passed the POST Act in 2020, requiring the NYPD to report the tools it uses to surveil New Yorkers. According to a report published by the Office of the Inspector General, the NYPD has failed to comply with the law’s requirements. These bills sponsored by Progressive Caucus Members Amanda Farías, Julie Won, and Crystal Hudson will strengthen the POST Act by limiting government use of facial recognition technologies and fortifying disclosure requirements, so that New Yorkers know if and how they are being surveilled.
Gerardo Romo/NYC Council Media Unit
In 2024, the New York City Progressive Caucus’s Homes Now, Homes for Generations budget campaign won $2 billion in capital spending on affordable housing and $140 million for HPD’s Neighborhood Pillars, an essential program to rehabilitate rent-stabilized housing and ensure those units stay rent stabilized into perpetuity, and for HPD’s Open Door program, which provides affordable homeownership options like limited-equity cooperatives to keep housing affordable for future generations.
Gerardo Romo/NYC Council Media Unit
