8 newyork| january3–16, 2022
intelligencer
The Group Portrait:
The Majority
For the first time, women make
up most of the City Council.
By Valeria Ricciulli
julie won, a 31-year-old tech consultant
who grew up in Queens, decided to run for City
Council after her parents lost their income. It was
the spring of 2020, and her mom, who worked at
a nail salon, and dad, who worked odd jobs at a
liquor store and a warehouse, suddenly became
unemployed. They spoke mostly Korean, so Won
tried to help them apply for public assistance. “We
were going through all these government systems,
but benefits never came through,” she recalls.
This month, Won begins her term as a represen-
tative of several Queens neighborhoods, includ-
ing Long Island City and Astoria. “If it weren’t for
covid,” she says, “I would have never made the
pivot to run for office.”
For the first time in the city’s history, New
Yorkers elected a City Council with a majority of
seats (31 out of 51) occupied by women. The new
Council, which is also a historically diverse group,
is the result of several factors: the pandemic’s
devastation of working-class communities of
color; the city’s matching-funds program, which
gives candidates $8 for every $1 they raise from
any city resident, amplifying the effect of small
donations; and the new ranked-choice voting
system, which encouraged more candidates to
run in party primaries and gave average New
Yorkers more influence over who wins.
Most of the candidates had to save money for
more than a year in order to run or had to juggle
full-time jobs with campaigning. From January
to June, Amanda Farías, the 32-year-old set to
replace lifelong Bronx politician Rubén Díaz Sr.,
would wrap up her day job at a nonprofit at
4 p.m., then dive into campaign work—knocking
on doors, making calls, participating in debates,
scheduling social media, and writing emails
until 2 a.m.
On December 8, right after new-member
orientation at City Hall, the women noticed that
while the men’s bathroom is inside the Council
chambers, the women’s is outside. “I said, ‘We
should just put a sign on it and call it a gender-
neutral bathroom,’ ” says Sandy Nurse, 37, a
Panama-born carpenter and com activist
representing Brooklyn’s 37th Dis d we’ll
just take it over.” It will start there, with “simple
things,” she says. And eventually, “we’re going to
do things that the city hasn’t seen before.” ■