When Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in March a plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to help New York’s taxi drivers, many praised the move. For years, officials had stood by as cabbies were channeled into exploitative loans that crushed them under mountains of debt. Finally, it seemed, the city was fixing an injustice.

       But an influential group of drivers is now urging recipients not to accept the city’s help, pressing for a more ambitious — and expensive — bailout in a fight that has escalated into a hunger strike. Bhairavi Desai, the head of the group, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, said she and a dozen others stopped eating Oct. 20 to push the city into offering more aid.

       “We’re not backing down,” Desai said.

       De Blasio, whose relief effort recently began handing out modest grants to help drivers negotiate with lenders to reduce their loans, has not budged from that plan, despite pressure from the city’s entire congressional delegation and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, to increase the assistance.

       The conflict is the latest turn in a yearslong saga over taxi medallions, the city permits that allow yellow cabs to pick up passengers on the street.

       Medallions were an unremarkable tool of city bureaucracy until about two decades ago, when a group of taxi industry leaders began steadily and artificially inflating the price of a medallion to more than $1 million. To afford the permits, drivers took on hefty loans while lenders pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars.

       The market collapsed in 2014, leaving drivers in debt, with many owing $500,000 or more. Hundreds went bankrupt. Several died by suicide. Industry leaders have long denied wrongdoing, blaming the crisis on ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft, which entered New York near the bubble’s peak and eventually took some revenue from cabs.

       Supporters of a more aggressive rescue plan have pointed out that the city played a role in the plight of the cabdrivers. During the bubble, the city exempted the industry from regulations and filled budget gaps by selling new medallions and running ads promoting them as an investment that was “better than the stock market.”

       After a 2019 series in The New York Times revealed the exploitative lending practices, a flurry of proposals emerged to help the drivers, including a $500 million plan from a city task force and the threat of an $810 million lawsuit from the state attorney general, Letitia James, who wanted to give the money to the drivers.

       But the pandemic struck, worsening the financial crisis for all cabdrivers and sapping the city’s budget, putting bailout plans on hold. By the time that de Blasio announced his program this year, it had a modest price tag: $65 million, covered by the federal stimulus package.

       The program provides individual medallion owners with up to $29,000 in grants that are meant to help them negotiate with their bank to lower their outstanding debt. The city has argued that because of the crisis, lenders are eager to agree to reduce the overall loan amounts in order to recoup some money from drivers who could otherwise default.

       Thousands of drivers are potentially eligible. As of last week, 155 drivers had reached deals to restructure their loans, including some who contributed their own money as part of the deal, according to the city. Before entering the program, city data show, those drivers owed about $310,000 on average — less than many cabbies. Today, they owe about $180,000 on average.

       In addition, about 1,000 other drivers have expressed interest in participating in the program, according to the city’s taxi commissioner, Aloysee Heredia Jarmoszuk.

       “I’m confident that the people that have reached out are going to reach deals and achieve meaningfully debt relief, hopefully before the end of the year,” Heredia Jarmoszuk said. “I think the program is achieving what it set out to do, and that is identifying medallion owners who have unmanageable debt and getting them into monthly payments they can manage.”

       The Taxi Workers Alliance has a sharply different view. The group, which says it represents about 20,000 drivers, has insisted since the day the plan was announced that the program does nothing to help drivers.

       The grants are too small to persuade lenders to reduce loans by a meaningful amount, the group argues — and even if drivers get some debt relief on paper, it will not matter because they will still owe far more than they could ever hope to repay, it contends.

       For months, Desai and her supporters have been pushing their own proposal, which calls for all lenders to agree to lower all medallion loans to $145,000 in return for a guarantee from the city that it will pay for any driver who defaults on a loan. The group estimates this will increase the city’s cost for the relief package by another $93 million.

       Over time, the group has held increasingly dramatic demonstrations, blocking bridges and camping outside City Hall around the clock for 43 days straight, and counting.

       The group also received a boost earlier this year when Randal Wilhite, a lawyer with a nonprofit organization working on the city relief fund, began speaking out against it, saying lenders were either not offering much debt relief or were refusing to participate altogether. Afterward, city officials asked that he stop working on the plan; the nonprofit ultimately suspended him from working on all its projects because he had spoken to the media.

       The protest effort has also been fueled by the industry’s ongoing crisis. Passengers have begun returning to yellow cabs, but business is still far below where it was before the pandemic. In September, the last month for which city data is available, there were 50% fewer cabs operating than before the pandemic, and the industry made 52% less revenue, according to city data.

       Among those joining in the group’s hunger strike is Richard Chow, a driver and the brother of Kenny Chow, a driver who faced enormous debt and died by suicide.

       In an interview, Chow said he felt weak and dizzy but would push on until the city agrees to help the drivers.

       In recent days, the group has received more support, as people have rallied around Chow and the others. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, recently visited the protesters at City Hall, as did actor Kal Penn, among others.

       One top ally is City Councilman Ydanis Rodríguez, who chairs the transportation committee and is close to Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor, who is likely to win the election this week. Adams, who declined to comment for this story, has indicated he might support increasing the aid package.

       Desai said cabdrivers could not wait until next year.

       “We’ve got one chance to make this right,” she said. “How are we ever going to build this level of political capital again?”

       c.2021 The New York Times Company

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