Council Member Chris Banks represents six Brooklyn neighborhoods and he’s got a budget demand that City Hall hasn’t met yet.
Banks, whose 42nd Council District stretches across East New York, Spring Creek, Starrett City, Brownsville, East Flatbush, Remsen Village, and Canarsie, laid out his 2026 priorities in a Q&A published by the Brooklyn Paper as part of AARP New York City’s Inside Government series. The series spotlights elected officials across the five boroughs.
His lead budget ask: bring the city’s baseline allocation to the Department for the Aging, DFTA, up to 1.5 percent of the total New York City budget. That number isn’t where it needs to be right now. Banks didn’t hedge. He said he’d commit to pushing for that increase, period.
“Our seniors, who built New York City,” Banks said, the sentence trailing off in a way that didn’t need a finish.
The 1.5 percent threshold isn’t just an arbitrary figure Banks pulled from thin air. It’s the benchmark AARP New York City has been pushing, and it’s the kind of hard target that separates a genuine commitment from the sort of soft, feel-good language that tends to evaporate between a campaign promise and an actual budget vote. Banks said he’s in. That’s what he told the series.
But the senior budget fight is only one part of what his office is working.
NYCHA is another front. Banks said he’ll push to preserve and protect Section 9 housing, the federal program that finances public housing units directly. The authority doesn’t need anyone to explain its problems. Elevators that don’t run. Boilers that quit in January. Roofs that leak into apartments while residents file complaint after complaint. Banks said he wants real capital investment in those repairs, not just studies and task forces. His district has NYCHA buildings. His constituents live in them.
On homeownership, Banks pointed to projects like Taylor-Wooten Estates and something called IUV as the model he wants replicated. It’s not just about getting units built, he said. Local jobs need to come with those projects. In his framing, affordable housing and workforce development aren’t two separate line items. They’re the same conversation.
Deed theft is something Banks has been working on that doesn’t get the tabloid treatment it deserves. Seniors and families in places like East New York can lose a home through predatory lien sales or legal maneuvering they didn’t fully understand when they signed something. One transaction can strip decades of family wealth. Banks said his office has been focused on protecting homeowners from exactly that kind of predation. It’s slow, it’s complicated, and it rarely makes a front page.
Then there’s the sanitation side of things. Every Brooklyn council member gets asked about dirty streets, and Banks didn’t dodge it. His office has put money into an organization called ACE that runs supplemental sanitation services in the district, filling in where the Department of Sanitation’s regular pickup schedule leaves gaps. Illegal dumping is the specific problem he’s targeting. It’s chronic in parts of East New York and Brownsville, and it’s the kind of quality-of-life issue that tells residents whether their elected official is paying attention to what their block actually looks like.
What ties all of it together, in Banks’s telling, is “intentionality and results,” the phrase he used to describe what he wants his tenure in office to mean. It’s not a complicated formulation. He’s saying don’t just show up, show outcomes.
The 04/10/2026 Q&A that ran through the Inside Government series covered all of this directly, and Banks didn’t leave himself a lot of wiggle room on the commitments. That’s either a strength or a liability, depending on what the 2026 budget season actually delivers for his district. His constituents in Canarsie, Brownsville, and the rest of the 42nd know what they’re waiting on.