I’m going into this mayor’s race deeply unsatisfied. Stringer had been my first choice, but he looks unlikely to win, even if the allegations against him didn’t make voting for him less attractive. I will likely end up ranking Kathy Garcia first and am still debating what to do about Stringer.

I expect the final choice to come down to Adams versus Yang, so this argument is mostly why progressives should clearly be supporting Adams over Yang in rankings. But the reality is I also support Adams over Morales and Wiley on several key issues, particularly housing development and education issues, and even think he might in practice be more effective on police reform, so it’s worth elaborating on why Adams should be given more consideration by progressive voters.

On the Anti-Yang Front

Why the hell is any progressive even thinking about supporting a guy opposed to the minimum wage? Here is Yang appearing on alt-Right David Rubin’s YouTube show, where, in this appearance, Yang echoes rightwing talking points about the minimum wage hurting small businesses. Yang instead advocates using his “Freedom Dividend” to subsidize those low-wage employers, a recipe for actually undercutting wage standards across industries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V5rvfJ_am0&t=5s

It’s not that the minimum wage is the only issue or even the most important one (although it is important) but I see it as a basic values issue. If you can look at any human being and say that their work isn’t contributing at least $15/hr to any endeavor, you have a fundamental contempt for working people.

And it’s telling that every other serious candidate (and I exclude from that definition those who think a home can be bought for $100K in Brooklyn) has at least some union or major community-based workers rights group supporting them. Yet they all looked at Yang and took a pass because they can see his contempt for the value of people’s labor.

This anti-labor attitude has come out as Yang has bashed the teachers union for supposedly blocking the return of students to school, even though parents have had the choice to send their kids back since last fall and mostly have chosen remote. And instead of supporting more funding for in-school services for kids with disabilities, Yang is promoting a “debit card” voucher to buy private services outside of schools, a proposal the Alliance for Quality Education has called just another “privatization” move little different from the kind Betsy DeVos has promoted.

I have mixed feelings on almost all the candidates on various issues but Yang has disastrous anti-labor views straight out of the worst of the neoliberal belief system- and Yang just handing out cash to pacify the masses is not progressive in my book but is exactly what Milton Friedman advocated.

This is of a piece with Yang being closely tied to Bradley Tusk, the venture capitalist-lobbyist who is a chief advisor for Yang’s campaign. Tusk ticks every box for screwed-up neoliberal fuckery, from helping Uber undermine local regulations to promoting cryptocurrencies. And this is the guy the New York Times notes would likely be the “shadow mayor for New York” given Yang’s inexperience.

Experience Matters

Yang’s inexperience highlights the other strong case for Eric Adams over Yang. It’s just ridiculous to think of Yang - a guy who couldn’t bother to vote in local elections and has never been elected to any office - being in charge of a City with a larger population than most states in the nation. And New York City is arguably a far greater challenge to govern given its byzantine politics and endless day-to-day policy crises.

Stringer aside, how did we get a field of candidates where Eric Adams is the only one elected to any position in the City? Adams has experience in Albany as a State Senator and in the City as Borough President - and his network of supporters including other Borough Presidents in Queens and the Bronx reflects his ability to pull folks together across the City, which will help him govern effectively. While Ross Barkan argues Adams has too much of the wrong experience (a point I will return to below), the lesson of Joe Biden is that a moderate Dem with competent political skills can move more progressive policy than expected, while incompetence can often doom it.

Which is where I can shift to noting my annoyance that the Working Families Party - the only group I’ve donated to consistently month-after-month for almost two decades - is once again asking supporters to vote for relative political neophytes for a top office. I voted for Zephyr Teachout and Cynthia Nixon out of my abiding hatred for Andrew Cuomo, but at some point, progressives need to be deploying people with real political experience for these jobs. Maybe Maya Wiley or Dianne Morales could master all the insane politics of the City if they won, but the alternative of political disaster would not just hurt progressives locally but be a talking point for conservatives smearing progressives nationally- a role failed New York City mayors have played for the whole post-War II era.

Yes, Eric Adams is way too close to the charter school lobby and was way too tolerant of the IDC via his protege Jesse Hamilton and has his own donor issues. Which normally would be enough to push me away if not for the experience issue and the policies I agree with him on compared to the nominal progressive standard-bearers. (Garcia is getting my first vote because she shares many similar policies with Adams, has serious administrative experience - the point the NY Times endorsement and Daily News endorsement made - and doesn’t have the same downsides).

I do think a lot of progressives gravitate to Yang because he feels like them culturally, while Adams is a seriously weird dude - a black cop who was a former Louis Farrahkahn defender turned self-professed Republican who also became an agitator against police brutality in the City and an early fighter for gay marriage (watch him here in 2009) - and is now a vegan who sounds like a damn hippie promoting “more plant-based foods [to] create a more sustainable and equitable food system.”

But Adams is weird the way a lot of regular people are weird, pulling their politics from a messy set of backstories, while progressive politicos can push towards a uniform kind of language and a certain cultural vibe that Yang fits and Adams does not.

But despite some well-justified criticisms, Adams has been out there fighting for working families year after year, a point a lot of labor leaders made when Adams racked up one of the largest set of union endorsements, including from DC 37, the largest municipal union, and SEIU 32BJ, the largest union representing primarily low-wage private-sector workers in the City. “We know he's committed to justice and equity for workers,” argued 32BJ President Kevin Bragg in an interview, pointing to Adams fighting for fast-food workers and better pay for airport workers.

Adding “hundreds of thousands of affordable apartments”

Beyond all that, a big reason I end up with Adams over Wiley and Morales is on an issue that often divides progressives— how much development to allow — and I land hard-core on the side of building as much residential housing as we possibly can to provide needed housing and to lower its costs, but also as an environmental imperative to help move people from the gas-guzzling suburbs into NYC where their carbon footprint is radically lowered.

Adams is the most aggressive of any candidate in calling for multiple steps to increase the housing supply in the City, specifically designating lower- and midtown Manhattan as his focus for significant upzoning, allowing micro-units like granny flats in current single-family zoning areas, allowing single-room occupancy units and basement apartments, and expanding non-profit land trusts on city-owned property for affordable housing. He was forthright in his interview with the Working Families Party that his goal was not a handful of new units built but adding “hundreds of thousands of affordable apartments” to the City. If New York State gets back its lost Congressional seat in ten years, it would be because of this kind of aggressive building program.

And Adams is clear that he won’t let local community boards block the program. He said he’d allocate planned units to each community board and give them six months to designate their own plans on where to build them- and if they failed to produce a plan, “the Department of City Planning will initiate its own plan.” Whether that sentence thrills you or it horrifies you is the dividing line on development among progressives - and I’m firmly on the side of overcoming the NIMBY blockage that has radically slowed urban housing growth across the country.

I’ve written a lot about this issue but I want to emphasize that building more housing is the single biggest thing a New York mayor can do to stop climate change. Every person who moves to NYC cuts their energy footprint by two-thirds, so as I detailed here, adding a million people to the City would be equivalent to shutting down 16 coal-fired power plants. Whether he styles himself that way, his housing plan makes Adams a far more environmentalist candidate than most of his ostensible progressive rivals who have extremely limited support for new housing development. (Garcia has a similarly ambitious housing plan as well.)

If I have any criticism of Adams’s housing plan, it is that he upzones midtown, while holding out for including on-site affordable housing - which is an incredibly expensive way to get only a few affordable units. Far better to tax the hell out of luxury housing downtown, then leverage federal and state matching dollars to build far larger numbers of units in cheaper areas of the City.

But the bottom-line is Adams is pushing largely the right policy here. If urban America doesn’t step up and allow massive amounts of new housing, we will continue to see skyrocketing rents and working families fleeing to suburban and exurban sprawl. So Adams wins hard on this issue with me.

Adams on Education and Diversity

On education, all the candidates want to improve educational quality, particularly early education. Adams has signed onto the statewide tax increases on the wealthy and, in addition, wants a local millionaires tax and luxury housing taxes to help fund education, including guaranteed child care from age 0-3 for low-income families up to making CUNY tuition-free.

If anything distinguishes Adams, it is his emphasis on universal screening of children for disabilities, particularly dyslexia, since so many kids fail to get the help they need early on, driving educational and economic inequality long into the future. While Adams is too pro-charter - the substantive policy of his I dislike the most - he does argue for forcing the charters to fairly admit children with disabilities and English Language Learners, which charters have notoriously failed to do.

Where Adams most strongly diverges from Wiley and Morales is on the issue of screened schools like the specialized high schools. Where Wiley and Morales call for rolling back most screened schools, Adams wants to invest more money in gifted and talented programs in middle schools and better preparation support in lower-income neighborhoods for those who apply for the specialized or other screened schools.

And instead of replacing the SHSAT with some other test or admission rules that would kick some students out to let others in, Adams argues for keeping the SHSAT and adding five more elite high schools with radically different admissions criteria. These new high schools would take the top-performing students from every middle school, which would guarantee diversity in admissions given the segregation of different neighborhood schools. Essentially, Adams is adopting De Blasio’s admission criteria from a few years ago intended to replace the SHSAT - and instead applying it to brand new schools Adams would create in each borough. (Garcia supports a similar plan) Since back in 2018, I argued in the NY Daily News for almost exactly the plan Adams is promoting, I’m going to side with Adams on this.

I think Adams has the better approach to educational policy here overall - helping every student get the education they need, whether specialized help for kids with disabilities or advanced classes for those who need those while focusing resources on the lowest-income schools to make sure students there get access to both.

But I will also note that just on the politics, attacking the SHSAT schools threatens to rip apart progressive coalitions. The majority of students currently in those schools are from Asian immigrant families, with 45% poor enough to qualify for free or reduced school lunches. Creating a zero-sum fight over a limited set of admission slots would drive many in the NYC Asian community out of any progressive coalition, much as urban education fights divided Democratic coalitions a generation ago. Adams was sympathetic early on to abolishing the SHSAT test but after hearing from his Asian community constituents in Brooklyn changed his mind, avoiding a zero-sum approach by expanding the number of slots available. Being sensitive to finding political solutions that don’t drive wedges within progressive coalitions is another plus for Adams in my mind.

On Police Reform Versus Less Policing

Some progressives are trying to paint Adams as a defender of police abuses, which is almost Orwellian given the only reason he has a political career was because of his early agitation against police brutality when he was a black cop challenging the racism and brutality of his fellow officers. Abner Louima, brutally beaten by police in 1997, endorsed Adams because he was one of the few police to support Louima then. The father of Sean Bell, murdered in police custody in 2006, also endorsed Adams for similarly demanding justice for his son.

This was Adams back in 2014 describing his own experience being arrested at age 15, an experience that motivated him to join the NYPD to fight those abuses:

Officers took me to the 103rd Precinct — the same precinct where an unarmed Sean Bell was later shot and killed by the police — and brought me into a room in the basement. They kicked me in the groin repeatedly…For seven days after that, I stared into the toilet bowl in my house at the blood I was urinating…
[N]ew horror stories kept compelling me to relive those memories: the nightmare experiences of Randolph Evans, Patrick Dorismond, Abner Louima and countless other young men have reminded me of my own secret. Think of all the secrets that young men of color are hiding. How many are concealing some dark truth of the abuse they endured, and what is that darkness doing to them?

Having a mayor with this lived experience and a twenty-five-year history of activism against police brutality would be an asset.

Yes, Adams is not anti-police in the abstract and does not believe in significantly cutting back the number of police on the street. But neither does most of the public as most polls reflect, but there is public support for removing bad cops from the NYPD and eliminating the abusive practices that Adams himself says veteran cops systematically teach trainees. Adams doesn’t just say there are a few “bad apples” on the police force but rather that those abuses are part of “a legacy of inequity that did not just appear overnight but was carved into the culture of law enforcement over decades.”

On the “Nixon going to China” theory, a former cop motivated to change the NYPD is far more likely than his predecessors to succeed in breaking the power of the police unions blocking reform. Adams doesn’t want to go as far as most progressives, including myself, in scaling back the over-policing of the City, but he may well be able to go farther in that direction than his rivals politically can.

And it’s worth noting his “law and order” rhetoric on deploying police is not accompanied by an agenda for more incarceration. In fact, he is calling for the opposite, arguing flatly that police should end arrests of the mentally ill for non-violent offenses and that “police need to have a reduced role in responding to some emotional health crisis calls” in favor of deploying peer responders and EMTs. His educational focus on screening for dyslexia flows from studies he argues “show that up to 30-40% of inmates in prisons are dyslexic,” emphasizing that his tough-on-crime views are not the same as seeing every kid as a criminal.

His specific agenda for police reform and accountability is smart and has innovative features. Adams plans to require new officers to live in the City, improve the training of all NYPD leadership, build on current efforts to make the NYPD’s own “monitoring list” of complaints against individual officers more publicly accessible, and create a whistleblower system to encourage officers to anonymously report bad conduct by other cops to investigators. He also promises to speed dismissal of officers accused of abuse, arguing for a two-month limit on internal discharge decisions. But the most dramatic change would be giving community boards the ability to veto local police precinct commanders. That would not just improve the fit of commanders for their communities, but also means every officer with ambition would know any personal history of abuses or toleration of abuses by those they supervise could cost them a precinct command in the future. After promising to strip community boards of their traditional role blocking new housing, Adams would actually give them something useful to do.

But doesn’t Adams want to bring back abusive stop-and-frisk practices, as Maya Wiley argued in a recent debate? The ridiculousness of that accusation is that Adams is the only person in the race who testified against Bloomberg’s abuse of stop-and-frisk and was cited by the judge in the evidence she used when she ruled NYPD’s practices to be unconstitutional. And before that in 2010, Adams was one of the leaders in a protest in Albany against the abuse of stop-and-frisk, joining then-City Councilman Jumaane Williams, when most city leaders were doing nothing.

Stop-and-frisk was originally a limited tool, approved by a unanimous Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, which allows an officer to disarm a suspect for a crime in progress. This was converted into the abusive NYPD policy applied even when no crimes were happening or no weapon was in evidence - a constitutional difference that Adams has articulated expertly (as here). I teach the Constitutional law of criminal procedure at John Jay where at least one class a semester is focused on NYC’s stop-and-frisk case - and it’s kind of heartening to have a candidate for mayor who actually understands and respects Constitutional distinctions when training officers.

Would Eric Adams Destroy the Left?

All these nice things said, Adams is certainly no movement socialist - even if he is more progressive than some critics grant. Ross Barkan worries that Adams will have such a powerful administration, with the Borough machines and organized labor behind him, that he will “try to crush the left.” Barkan argues that where Yang as mayor would basically be so feckless that the left could out-organize him, a “Mayor Adams can pick up the phone and tell 1199, 32BJ, and DC37 to stop endorsing DSA candidates.”

As I said above, I think competent government is good for getting progressive policy even out of more moderate elected leaders- and competent leaders force opposition movements on the left to themselves become more competent, rather than hoping for inept politicians to leave them a political opening.

The Left in New York has a long history of both allying with and challenging local power players, from building the American Labor Party in the 1930s in quasi-alliance with Fiorello La Guardia during the New Deal to supporting the rise of often radically disruptive municipal and health care unions who challenged the city establishment in the 1960s and 1970s to allying in the 1980s and 1990s with the city’s first black mayor, David Dinkins - who people often forget was a member of DSA but also had his own machine politics alliances.

Even if a Mayor Adams is not an ally of progressives- and there is a history of people surprising you (see Biden) - he might end up being the sparring partner that would force left groups like DSA and other left allies to figure out the terms of cooperation with organized labor and other organizations to become a more formidable force that Adams couldn’t ignore or sideline.

In the end, I think the best thing for progressives is a candidate who will deliver the best policy results for the City of New York. While I do think Kathy Garcia would deliver much of the same policy without some of the baggage, Eric Adams’s commitment to actually building housing for New Yorkers, delivering educational opportunity without pitting communities against each other in zero-sum school admission fights, and his genuine commitment to police reform makes him a decent choice for progressives— and infinitely better than Andrew Yang.

Left Future

The (Reluctant) Progressive Case for Eric…