Council Member Chris Banks wants more money for seniors, cleaner streets, and safer homes for the families who’ve built East New York and Brownsville. He’s got a list, and he’s not shy about it.
Banks, who represents the 42nd Council District in Brooklyn, sat down recently to lay out his priorities for 2026 and beyond. The district covers East New York, Spring Creek-Starrett City, Brownsville, East Flatbush, Remsen Village, and Canarsie. That’s a lot of ground, and a lot of people who don’t always make it into City Hall conversations.
His top ask on the budget front: raise the city’s baseline allocation to the Department for the Aging, known as DFTA, to 1.5 percent of the overall NYC budget. Right now, it isn’t there. “Our seniors, who built New York City,” Banks said, stopping just short of finishing the thought, though the implication was clear enough.
The push on DFTA is part of a broader commitment Banks made to AARP New York City, which sponsored a Q&A series called Inside Government with PoliticsNY focused on elected officials across the five boroughs. He said flat out he’d commit to advocating for that increase. Not a hedge. Not a maybe.
Still, the senior housing piece is only one lane of what Banks is running.
He’s also zeroing in on NYCHA, the city’s public housing authority, which has been lurching from crisis to crisis for years. Banks said he plans to advocate to preserve and protect Section 9 housing, the federal program that funds public housing units directly, and push for investment in the kind of infrastructure repairs that NYCHA residents have been waiting on for too long. Broken elevators. Busted boilers. Leaking roofs. The stuff that makes daily life a grind.
On affordable homeownership, Banks pointed to Taylor-Wooten Estates and a project called IUV as examples of what he wants to see more of. Not just housing units, he said, but local jobs attached to those projects. The two goals aren’t separate in his mind.
Deed theft came up, too. Banks said he’s been working to protect homeowners from deed theft and predatory lien sales, a persistent and ugly problem in neighborhoods like East New York where seniors or cash-strapped families can get maneuvered out of their own homes through legal sleight of hand. It’s a quiet crisis that doesn’t generate a lot of tabloid headlines, but it can gut a family’s wealth in one transaction.
The cleanliness question is one every Brooklyn council member gets, and Banks didn’t dodge it. He said his office has invested in an organization called ACE, which provides supplemental sanitation services in the district. That means going beyond what the Department of Sanitation picks up on its regular runs. Illegal dumping is the specific enemy here. Anyone who’s driven through parts of East New York knows what he’s talking about. Mattresses, construction debris, bags piled three feet high between pickup days.
He also cited work on behalf of neurodiverse children, specifically pushing for safe play spaces in NYC parks. That’s the kind of niche, unglamorous constituency work that doesn’t make the evening news but matters enormously to the families who need it. Not flashy. Just useful.
Banks described his broader approach as driven by “intentionality and results,” a phrase that sounds like boilerplate until you match it against the specifics he rattles off. Two years in, he said, the focus has been on delivering for communities that get overlooked when the budget negotiations happen and when the cameras aren’t rolling.
His office also coordinates directly with city agencies on constituent issues, connecting residents with community-based organizations funded through his discretionary allocation. Banks chairs a committee, which gives him some oversight leverage over city policies touching public housing, economic development, and land use.
That piece of it matters more than people realize. A committee chair can slow things down, speed things up, or kill something in its sleep.
A fuller account of the Q&A, originally reported by the Brooklyn Paper, provides additional context on Banks’s district priorities and his commitment to aging services.
The city’s preliminary budget process is already underway, and the fight over DFTA’s share of the pie will get louder as spring turns toward summer. Banks has already said where he stands. Now comes the part where standing somewhere actually costs something.