Dozens of yellow taxi drivers shut down Manhattan-bound traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge Thursday afternoon in a desperate call for relief from Mayor de Blasio.
With tourism all but gone in the city and the bulk of Manhattan’s offices nearly empty, yellow taxi driver-owners have found it impossible to make their monthly debt payments on loans backed by their medallions, which have plunged in value thanks to competition from Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing apps.
Yellow cabs handled 92% fewer rides in June than in June 2019 — and the pandemic hurt demand so much that 82% of the city’s 13,500 yellow taxi medallions weren’t even on the road in July, according to data from the Taxi and Limousine Commission.
With such little money or pick-ups available, help from the city can’t come soon enough for cabbies like Mouhamadou Aliyu, 48, who bought a yellow taxi medallion at a 2004 city auction for $331,00 and now owes $632,000 after refinancing.
Aliyu was already struggling with his $2,452 monthly payments before the pandemic.
“This city has never been like this. It’s empty. It’s nothing,” said Aliyu. “There are no airports. There is no Times Square. People are not going back to work. There are no museums. We depend on tourism, and there is no tourism right now.”
Aliyu said his lender, Aspire Federal Credit Union, has offered to reduce his payments to $250 per week until the end of February, but he’s unable to even pay that.
“They call me every day to try to collect,” he said. “I tell them I am not working. I have no money. What am I supposed to do?”
Bhairavi Desai, president of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, has for months asked the mayor to help struggling cabbies to refinance their medallion loans by guaranteeing up to $125,000 if a medallion owner defaults or is foreclosed upon.
Desai said medallion loans must be refinanced so drivers pay no more than $750 per month, and claimed the plan would cost the city no more than $75 million over 20 years.
Lenders have foreclosed on medallions — which give cabs the exclusive right to street hails in the city — at a record rate since the start of 2019. The city Taxi and Limousine Commission halted all medallion foreclosures in April and May during the pandemic, but records show 68 were foreclosed on from June through August.
“What we’re asking the city of New York to do is act as a backstop,” said Desai. “It incentivizes the lenders to come to the table and work out these debts. It allows our people to survive.”
Some cabbies whose loans are owned by MarbleGate, a Connecticut-based firm with roughly 4,000 New York yellow taxi medallions in its portfolio, have had better luck.
The company has since March promised yellow taxi driver-owners a “payment holiday” to give them relief during the pandemic, though some have still received delinquency notices and have been told they must pay each month.
“I didn’t drive from March to the end of July, and they told me last month I could have no more payment holidays,” said Vinod Malhotra, 55, who owes $435,000 on his medallion and has monthly payments of $2,630.
“Now I work five or six days a week, and make at most $150 per day but that is before gas and other expenses. I have a home mortgage to pay. I have two kids in college. How can I afford all that?”
Malhotra said the only way he’ll be able to survive in the years to come is if the city pushes through a debt refinancing program like the one pitched by the Taxi Workers Alliance.
De Blasio spokesman Mitch Schwarz said that’s unlikely to happen, and pointed to comments the mayor made last month claiming the city would not be able to put up the cash without help from the federal government.
Bronx Councilman Ritchie Torres in April floated plan like that of the Taxi Workers Alliance — but instead proposed to revalue medallions at $250,000 instead of $125,000. He said the city should immediately move forward on a relief plan to prevent the entire yellow cab industry from collapsing.
“The medallion affordable finance plan would have the benefit of saving the medallion industry without the cost of a bailout,” said Torres. “The city has to intervene with an ambitious solution… Only a system solution will stop the bleeding.”