ERIC ADAMS AND THE VISION THING
It’s not too early to compare and contrast new mayor’s policy ambition to Bill de Blasio’s
Only a couple of weeks into his tenure as mayor of New York City, Eric Adams seems to be everywhere. He’s biking out of Gracie Mansion, riding the subway and racing to the scene of a tragic fire. His energy — and evident enthusiasm for the job — is infectious.
Adams, a former borough president, state senator and police captain, has promised a “get stuff done” mayoralty. He wakes up early and goes to bed late.
The pandemic won’t intimidate him either. “We’ve allowed people to beat us down so much that all we did was wallow in COVID,” Adams said recently. “We no longer believed this is a city of swagger. This is a city of resiliency.”
All of this is notable because we are coming off eight years of Bill de Blasio, who never seemed to relish the job. He rolled in late on many days, infrequently started events on time, sparred with reporters and constantly attempted — with little success — to build a national profile for himself, eventually mounting a failed bid for the presidency. De Blasio left office quietly, with sagging poll numbers and limited fanfare. He was the mayor many New Yorkers, for now, seem content to forget.
But Adams and de Blasio are different in at least one other way that does not reflect too highly on the new mayor: There are no big ideas coming out of this City Hall. Not yet, anyway.
By now, political watchers roll their eyes when anyone starts talking about de Blasio and universal pre-kindergarten. Yes, he did it, they say with exasperation, but what else was there? One program does not make a whole mayoralty!
The success of de Blasio’s UPK initiative, however, cannot be handwaved away, especially as it grows clear that the program will exist indefinitely and Democratic executives nationally are looking to it as a clear model of success. President Biden has extolled the virtue of universal pre-K. Any federal program would have to build from New York City’s framework, where tens of thousands of public school kids attend UPK every year.
Unlike Adams, de Blasio entered office with a clear, easily defined policy agenda. Voters understood what he wanted to do: hike taxes on the wealthy to fund a UPK program, which did not exist in 2014. De Blasio had other far-reaching goals as well, like passing a paid sick-days law, building and preserving many thousands of affordable apartments, freezing rents on rent-stabilized apartments, ending stop-and-frisk and otherwise reforming policing while driving down crime, and giving municipal IDs to undocumented immigrants.
Very early into his tenure, many of these aims were fulfilled, and others were begun with ambition.
In part, de Blasio was a victim of his own success and grew aimless as time wore on. After his first couple of years, and his titanic struggles with Andrew Cuomo and state Senate Republicans to get UPK off the ground, he seemed increasingly disinterested in governing the city. Other significant achievements, like a right to counsel for low-income tenants or subsidized
MetroCards for the poor, were foisted upon him by an ambitious City Council.
Still, by the standard de Blasio set, though, Adams has a long way to go. On his very first day in office, The News’ Michael Gartland asked Adams if he had any clear policy goals for his first 100 days.
The otherwise brash Adams demurred. “We have a comprehensive 100-day plan,” Adams said. “We have to start right away, day one, so you’ll get them all.”
Such a plan has not been released. Adams certainly has plenty of crises to manage, from the omicron wave impacting public schools to the fallout from the deadliest city fire in 30 years. A reactive and quasi-competent mayoralty may be all New Yorkers want for now.
The unfortunate irony is that it is often good politics, in the short-term at least, to promise less and exceed low expectations. De Blasio set lofty goals, speaking exhaustively about “transformation,” and tried to reach them. To get there, he had to battle vicious political foes, like Cuomo and Albany Republicans, who constantly wanted him to fail. Pundits were happy to opine on these failures, when they came, and portray de Blasio as hapless.
Adams is not taking these kinds of risks, at least now. In these first few months, this will help him because there will be fewer opportunities for embarrassment. If he’s not
investing in tough political or policy fights to achieve great change, voters and pundits will not judge him harshly for not meeting a particular objective.
At some point, however, Adams will need to do more than stage photo-ops or rail against people who don’t close doors during fires, as he did after the blaze in the Bronx killed 17 people. He will need plans and ideas because the city has so many challenges that charisma alone won’t fix.
What will the Adams City Hall do about homelessness? So far, he and Gov. Hochul have teamed up on a plan to send more outreach workers to homeless on the subways to coax them into shelters. It’s a nice idea that’s been tried before. Adams is also supportive of flooding the subway system with more police, which will inevitably lead to hostile encounters and do little to solve one of the city’s most intractable problems.
It does make an easy headline: Send cops in and hope for the best. De Blasio’s failure was treating homelessness as a social services problem rather than a housing problem, building additional shelters to cram families inside. Adams, who is close to the real estate industry, has yet to propose a workable plan to build more housing that the city’s poorest can actually afford. During the mayoral campaign, he backed a plan to convert underused hotels and accessory-dwelling units into housing but has spoken little on its since. No projects have been proposed.
Oddly, Adams has declined to say if he’ll ever appoint a deputy mayor for housing. Perhaps no issue is of greater importance to New York City, where millions are renters, a pandemic-era eviction moratorium is expiring and new housing is badly needed for those who have nowhere to live but the streets or shelters.
Adams’ new transportation commissioner, a former city councilman named Ydanis Rodriguez, has been mum so far on how he’d like to oversee the city’s bus and bike lanes. De Blasio’s Vision Zero plan made some very significant gains before limping to the finish in a very bloody final year. Pedestrian fatalities are on the rise and cars are clogging city streets as too many New Yorkers avoid subways and buses during the pandemic. What does the Adams DOT plan to do about long-running conflicts between bicyclists, pedestrians and drivers?
Beyond transit, does Adams have a plan for the underfunded city parks and libraries? What about the public hospitals? Will the property tax system ever be reformed? There are many, many outstanding questions.
Of course, it’s still very early for Adams. His 100-day plan may be upcoming, or he may eschew the symbolism of arbitrary deadlines. But it’s important to remember that for all his faults, it was never too early for de Blasio when it came to trying to enact all that he campaigned on.
By mid-January of de Blasio’s first year, his entire City Hall team was aggressively focused on finding ways to create a universal pre-K program. The City Council, meanwhile, knew exactly what bills to send to de Blasio’s desk so he’d sign them quickly into law.
For all his pent-up energy, Adams has not demonstrated the same degree of ambition or interest. Both the City Council and Legislature are awaiting the Adams City Hall agenda, the big asks that they will either accept or negotiate against.
Instead, Adams has invested himself in odd and ultimately self-destructive fights. He seems intent on appointing his brother to a $210,000-a-year post overseeing his security, potentially flouting city nepotism laws. He has already appointed the scandal-scarred Phil Banks to be his deputy mayor for public safety, a newly created post that might allow Banks to be the de facto police commissioner.
Here, Adams is showing ambition — for stacking his government with those closest to him, regardless of qualifications. His new chief of staff, Frank Carone, is the attorney who effectively ran the Brooklyn Democratic Party. Old-fashioned machine politics and patronage might be making a comeback.
There is still plenty of time for Adams to offer a greater, more comprehensive agenda for the city. He will soon deliver his first State of the City address and omicron’s eventual decline could give him room to talk about issues beyond COVID. On transit, housing, health care, education, and infrastructure, there is so much still to do.
Swagger is great for a new mayor. What’s even better is a vision to match that energy and drive.