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A family of public service

Sitting down in a diner on East 56th Street — just around the corner from where his grandmother spent most of her life and raised his father — Wetzler said that public service had appealed to him from a young age.

Growing up on East 63rd Street, Wetzler said he was just a short walk from his grandmother, who really cared about politics and the value of serving with integrity.

She would draw on a family example to drive the message home, Wetzler said.

“This was a story grandmother must have told me 100 times over the course of my life,” Wetzler said.

It was the story of Wetzler’s great-uncle — former upstate Assembly Member, George M. Michaels — who, after a last minute shuffle of votes creating a tie, decided to torpedo his own political career and vote his conscience in favor of a landmark pre-Roe v. Wade state abortion bill in 1970.

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His district was largely conservative, and opposed the bill, but Michaels decided to ultimately cast a vote that he thought was right and not just one that would advance his office.

“I realize, Mr. Speaker, that I am terminating my political career,” Michaels famously said in a floor speech, “but I cannot in good conscience sit here and allow my vote to be the one that defeats this bill.”

His last minute vote-flip helped pass the bill, which legalized abortion in New York State.

Michaels, after five terms in office, lost his next re-election.

The New Yorker recently produced a film about that moment, and it was a story that Wetzler said shaped his views on the role of public service.

“It was something that really drove home the importance of both public service and of being somebody who, in serving the public, shows courage,” Wetzler said, “and being willing to tell people something that they might not necessarily want to hear, or to do what’s right even when that’s not convenient.”

Turning the wheels

After graduating from John Hopkins University, Wetzler went right in to public service, trading the Upper East Side for Albany during a three-year stint as a performance analyst under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

His task, as part of the SAGE Commission, was to find ways government can work better by digging through tons of raw, bureaucratic data.

“At one point, I had a dataset of every DMV transaction in the entire state, and we were putting together strategies,” Wetzler said, “to make the wheels turn a little better, a little faster.”

That early experience out of college, he said, gave him crucial insights into how government really impacts the “day-to-day life of constituents.”

In 2015, Wetzler moved back to the Upper East Side — the East 80s, to be precise — and began working with housing data as a policy analyst at the New York State office of Homes & Community Renewal, an office which aims to enhance affordable housing and homeownership around the state.

It was about a year later that Wetzler went from policy to politics, he said.

After the election of former President Donald Trump, Wetzler said a lot of people — like him — wanted to get more involved in the campaign, and had joined the local Four Freedoms Democratic Club. But, he said, it seemed like the local party apparatus was not meeting that interest.

And he wasn’t alone. Other politically involved members of the neighborhood said they wanted to find a new District Leader, and encouraged Wetzler to run.

“One day I just said: ‘Well, it needs to be someone, it might as well be me.'”

As District Leader, he found space at the Metallic Lathers Union shop on Third Avenue, who were happy to help provide room for local Democratic organizing, and turned it into a hub for locals to get involved with the party.

“I was there every single day,” Wetzler said, occasionally bringing Rice Krispie’s Treats baked in his apartment just blocks away. “If anyone wanted to show up and make phone calls for a Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania or upstate or any hotly contested district.”

Weekends were spent on rented charter buses to help doorknock for contested races in Long Island, upstate and anywhere within driving distance, he said.

Last year, Wetzler decided to not run for re-election and was replaced by current District Leader Ben Akselrod.

The issues

As a housing policy analyst for most of his professional life, it’s no surprise that housing is a top issue for Wetzler. But it’s not the only issue on his mind, he told Patch.

Here’s some of the issues and positions Wetzler would look to run on in his race to City Council:

Housing

Wetzler said that he wants to see the city bring a more holistic approach to how it handles housing and planning.

“Public policy in the city right now is very reactive,” Wetzler said. “We don’t think about having neighborhood planning on housing until a developer comes along and says ‘I want to build something,’ and that’s when the process starts.”

A common issue in the district, especially on the Upper East Side, he says, is how a nearly net-loss of supply had made the neighborhood unfriendly to housing families, a result of a reduction in housing units through combinations and the proliferation of huge towers containing fewer units than the walk-ups they knocked down.

“This neighborhood used to be much more accessible to new families,” Wetzler said, “why is it not anymore?”

The solution is not to wait for individual building proposals and then ask for changes, but to start from the beginning and consider the community you’d want to see, said Wetzler.

Housing policy to Wetzler is like a three-legged stool built on tenant protections, financial assistance to encourage the building of housing that’s actually needed and viable for New Yorkers and planning.

He says the city needs to be planning “things like open space, thinking about schools and what your actual housing needs are,” before developers are looking to build.

Wetzler and his partner just moved to Stuyvesant Town — a process which involved his girlfriend abruptly leaving her job in the middle of the day to run to the leasing office when they heard a unit was available — and he says that the city used to have a “significant commitment to housing that’s not just the bare minimum.”

He applauds efforts like the Midtown South rezoning, City of Yes, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine’s efforts to highlight potential sites for housing at a local level and the work to convert office space to housing.

But he wants to see the effort to be more holistic, and find creative ways to bring green space, open space and pedestrian-friendly streets to areas like Midtown, especially if the city wants families to actually live there.

“Families should be able to age in place and have their kids live nearby,” Wetzler said. “Let’s not wait for corporate interests to come along and say they want to construct a building here. To get out of that trap, you have to start from the beginning.”

Safety

Wetzler says that housing has a direct connection to public safety. But he also thinks that policy decisions have a direct effect on the feeling of unease — like the Supreme Court’s move to weaken the city’s gun laws.

But closer to home, Wetzler points to the New York State’s Constitution which limits the number of judges that can come from any county.

“Manhattan, as a result, has a court system that is sort of overwhelmed,” he said, “and it just sort of exacerbates all of the problems in the criminal justice system.”

The other big public safety issue, Wetzler says, is homelessness and the growing mental health crisis, which he said needs a total rethink in how services are being delivered, and wants to see the city bring back single-room occupancy options in addition to expanding supportive housing — and was a big supporter of the original safe-haven shelter proposed for East 91st Street.

“A lot of the homeless population are just in the worst possible manifestation of the much broader housing crisis,” he said, “people who just got evicted or families fleeing domestic violence.”

Street safety is another big issue for Wetzler.

Infrastructure in the city, he said, should allow for “everyone to share the road safely,” Wetzler said.

“It’s taken on a bit of a culture war aspect to it, which is not helping things,” he said.

But in addition to street redesigns, Wetzler says there needs to be better enforcement of traffic laws.

“If someone is being reckless, regardless of what type of vehicle they’re in,” he said, “I expect them to get a ticket. You can’t have people zooming through red lights and you can’t have people biking on the sidewalk, and you can’t have trucks that are too large to legally operate in the city driving with impunity.”

Schools

Wetzler’s other big issue is school, where he wants to take his planning and data experience to create a proactive stance towards schools and the future.

His niece just turned one recently, but Wetzler’s sister said the most stressful decision is if universal 3-K is even going to exist when her daughter is eligible.

“From from cradle all the way into adulthood, I think that the city really needs to be given kind of personal attention to kids and providing the funding sufficient to make sure that everyone is getting a good education,” Wetzler said, noting that such policies benefit parents as much as children.

Wetzler also thinks there’s a brewing crisis beneath the surface for many city children, whose lives were upended by the pandemic, and that the city is not taking the academic and mental health consequences seriously.

“Imagine if 100 percent of your social life suddenly was only happening on the internet,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing that’s not going to be fixed though business as usual.”

The city, he says, should reduce class sizes to help bring more individual attention to kids — and hire more teachers and counselors.

Wetzler says the city also needs to proactively plan for school seats by planning for and building new schools, and not wait for the crisis moment to take action.

“If we think about it ahead of time, and we tie it into our discussions about land use and housing and neighborhood planning, then we will save ourselves all this grief and really provide a much better service to the public,” he said.

To learn more about Wetzler, visit his website at www.voteben.nyc

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