District 39 City Council Member Shahana Hanif, who represents parts of Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Gowanus, Borough Park and Carroll Gardens, is defending her seat against political outsider Maya Kornberg in the June 24 primary.
Since throwing her hat in the ring in December, Kornberg, a former researcher at the Brennan Center For Justice, has nearly matched her opponent’s fundraising, pulling in one dollar less than Hanif's $192,534, according to the New York City Campaign Finance Board.
Kornberg says she styles herself as a “pragmatic progressive” and thinks she is equipped to fight President Donald Trump. Hanif, who is part of the City Council’s progressive caucus, said otherwise, noting that Kornberg had “no experience in public service, passing legislation or delivering any services.”
Hanif, the first Muslim woman elected to New York City Council in 2021, flexed her experience on the Council, saying in the wake of Trump’s reelection, her first reaction was "Okay, my team and I know exactly what we're doing."
Kornberg, who is originally from California, moved to New York for graduate school and recently settled down in Park Slope where she is raising her four-month-old son. She is a member of the Park Slope Food Co-op and has served on the executive board of the Independent Neighborhood Democrats and Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats.
“Over the course of my career, I have been really focused… on making sure that our democracy is serving the people that it's meant to,” Kornberg told BK Reader. “Right now, we're facing an attack on a federal level. I want to make sure that everyone in this district and city has the resources that they need.”
Kornberg is “a big proponent" of the City of Yes housing development plan and believes building more houses will help address rising rents across District 39. However, she cautioned that housing needs to be “affordable, sustainable and built in a way that is responsive to community needs.”
She applauded the work of Housing Not Highrises, a Windsor Terrace group for doing a "wonderful" job organizing residents during the proposed rezoning of the Arrow Linen plant, a contentious development in the neighborhood. The group pushed Hanif and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso to mandate the project be nine stories instead of the planned 13, and 40% of the units be affordable.
Hanif countered that she had been “advocating for more affordability since the get-go," when asked about the rezoning of the Arrow Linen development. The city’s approach to building housing was “deeply flawed," she said, citing the governing of the New York City Housing Authority as a “policy failure.”
“I had friends who were four siblings and two parents in a one bedroom apartment,” Hanif recalled about immigrant families she grew up with. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”
Both candidates agreed that the affordability crisis was not limited to high rent.
“A huge part of the affordability crisis, for young families like my own, is childcare,” Kornberg said, adding she supports universal childcare.
Hanif said universal child care was important, so the “child we've seen working in the train stations… selling candy” would “have a place to be.”
Providing health care was also a priority issue for both candidates.
Hanif said she helped secure $1 million in funding for the New York Abortion Access Fund at the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. The funds cover procedural costs and “practical support like childcare,” according to Hanif.
While she was navigating her high-risk pregnancy last year, Kornberg said she “found that I had to advocate for myself every step of the way to get the basic care.” Kornberg added she wanted to invest more in patient advocates and noted that healthcare was a human right.
Regarding policing and safety issues, Kornberg said she would work with other council members who don't share her support of the police.
“You need to be building coalitions and consensus,” Kornberg said. ”You don't need to be gatekeeping and making more enemies than friends.”
In 2023, as co-chair of the progressive caucus, Hanif and the caucus' leadership made members sign on to new bylaws that mandated they would work to reduce the size of the NYPD. This caused a defection of 15 members.
However, Hanif countered that she has worked well with the police on addressing robbery and break-ins along the 5th Avenue corridor, but added that “we need alternatives to the police” because they “can't solve the crisis of homelessness and mental illness.”
Recently, Kornberg faced criticism from a Democratic political group for taking money from billionaires Len Blavatnik and Daniel Loeb, both of whom often fund Republican candidates and have praised the Trump administration. Kornberg contends that they have also donated to Governor Kathy Hochul, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Attorney General Letitia James. “So I'm proud to be on a list, with any of those folks any day," she said.
The New York Post also reported that Hanif had used her discretionary funding powers to fund three nonprofits her then-boyfriend, and now husband, was a board member of. Hanif said that her partner never received financial compensation for being on the boards of the nonprofits and she renewed the same amount that Brad Lander, her Council predecessor, had allocated to the organizations.
Also running for the seat is 19-year-old Luke Saghir, a resident of Windsor Terrace.
