Last year, after Comptroller Brad Lander criticized City Hall’s handling of the migrant crisis, Mayor Eric Adams denigrated him as “the loudest person in the city.” It’s only one of many issues they’ve clashed over, from budget cuts to Rikers Island, since the Brooklyn Democrats both ascended to citywide office in 2022. The tension is partially by design: As the city’s chief financial and accountability officer, the comptroller is tasked with auditing the mayoral administration. Lander has done so with zeal, issuing report after report on problems with homeless sweeps, police technology, emergency contracting, and more, causing Adams to at times lash out.
Now, Lander will challenge Adams for mayor in next year’s Democratic primary.
“Mayor Adams is not providing the leadership that the future of the city demands,” Lander said in an extended interview leading up to his official announcement on Tuesday. “We’ve come out of the pandemic,” he continued, “but he is neither articulating a compelling vision of the future nor getting things done on a daily basis.”
According to Lander, the mayor is failing across the board — on public safety, housing affordability, early childhood education, and, more generally, the basics of running city government. “The problems he’s solving are the ones he created,” Lander said, citing Adams’s recent agreement with the City Council to restore tens of millions of dollars in cuts to library funding the mayor himself had previously made despite widespread protests from Lander and many others.
A top progressive leader, he joins the growing field of challengers seeking to unseat the centrist former NYPD captain who has low public-approval ratings but a sizable war chest and solid political base of support. Lander appears to be the most formidable challenger to Adams given his own citywide perch and the strength of his 2021 electoral coalition. During the campaign, he will offer a progressive vision as a “bighearted” policy wonk, but he’s clearly honing a broad-based appeal, promising to invest more in popular programs like universal 3-K while stressing “stronger management.” He gets that he may have the most convincing to do when it comes to voters’ concerns over public safety. In a sense, he’ll try to sell to voters that he can merge the best of the two prior mayors: Michael Bloomberg’s innovation and management chops and Bill de Blasio’s focus on equity.
“People want more affordable housing. They want a city that doesn’t have mentally ill people sleeping on the street. They want a city where the subways are working and are well funded,” Lander said. “Big bold ideas that require good leadership and good management that delivers results. And I really do believe that transcends some of the more ideological political divides that are playing out nationally. And that’s my plan for this campaign.” It’s part of a trend among progressives who are recalibrating in response to pandemic-era increases in crime, public frustration with rising costs, a backlash against “wokeism,” and some voters of color moving toward Republicans.
Lander, 55, entered politics by succeeding de Blasio in the City Council, representing a swath of Brooklyn from Gowanus through Park Slope and down to Kensington from 2010 through 2021. His top accomplishments, he told me, were sponsoring a long series of workers’-rights laws, a large-scale rezoning of Gowanus expected to produce thousands of new housing units, and efforts to desegregate district middle schools. In 2021, he won an upset victory in the comptroller primary, narrowly defeating Corey Johnson, the Council Speaker.
Lander’s brownstone-Brooklyn political base — he lives with his wife and two young-adult children in Park Slope — is vote-rich territory, home to many highly educated white liberals. If Lander’s going to become mayor, he will need massive turnout from his base and other similar neighborhoods on both sides of the East River. In the 2021 primary, he drew together liberals, progressives, and democratic socialists in the sort of unity that eluded everyone to Adams’s left in the mayoral race. Recapturing that support in the months ahead may be Lander’s most important campaign goal.
He joins a primary field that includes Adams; former comptroller Scott Stringer, who came in fifth last time but has a base on the Upper West Side; and Brooklyn state senator Zellnor Myrie, a young rising star. “Zellnor and Scott are friends and people I have worked with, and people I admire, and they, of course, will make their case as well in the coming months,” Lander said, hedging on how he may strategically approach the primary competition under ranked-choice voting. “One thing we all agree on is we need a new mayor.”
With record-low polling and federal investigators looking into his orbit and seizing his phone, Adams is undoubtedly vulnerable. But no incumbent mayor has been unseated in three decades, even longer in a primary, and though there are signs it has been fraying, Adams has a formidable base across communities of color, especially in Black middle-class neighborhoods, and moderate-to-conservative white voters throughout the boroughs. He also has a financial advantage and will likely be supported by significant outside spending, whether from labor-union allies or wealthy interests who like his policies or may fear a more progressive mayor.
Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, has been offering his own narrative of success, and he and his allies have pushed back against criticism of his “incompetence” as false racist tropes. What does Lander, who is white, say to those allegations, which will only intensify as the campaign unfolds?
“First, the set of people who are dissatisfied with Eric Adams’s leadership is broad and all across the city,” he said, “regardless of neighborhood, of race, of ideology, people feel the lack of leadership on the key issues that matter. So that’s not me. That’s New Yorkers, and you can see it if you talk to them; you could see it in the polling; you could talk to a lot of diverse elected officials; you could talk to people who supported and voted for him who feel that way.”
It’s also in the data that his office produces, according to Lander. “The fact that it’s taking longer than ever to get low-income, working-class, and homeless New Yorkers into the affordable housing we’re building — that’s just what the data says,” he said. Lander is quick to list off a series of other problems his office has helped expose, pointing to its work unraveling the city’s $432 million emergency contract with DocGo, a problematic medical-services provider the Adams administration chose to use for migrant care.
Lander’s platform will include proposals to significantly expand affordable homeownership opportunities (leveraging city resources to help municipal employees buy a home and launching a new Mitchell-Lama program) and reimagine the public-university system through taking city control of CUNY. Other ideas include a ban on smartphones in city schools and a major expansion of after-school programming.
But one key question for Lander, and other candidates to Adams’s left, is whether he can convince voters to trust him on public safety. “As mayor, we will end street homelessness of severely mentally ill New Yorkers,” Lander said. “The mayor’s approach has been to push them around.” He promised a detailed plan for a “continuum of care” with a housing-first approach but also more psychiatric hospital beds and, at times, involuntary removals of individuals from public spaces.
As de Blasio painfully learned early in his tenure, a progressive mayor can easily clash with the NYPD. Lander, who focused on police reform in the City Council, believes he can run the department effectively by choosing the right leadership, instituting more accountability, and appealing to officers by improving their working conditions through departmental policies and labor-union negotiations.
Any mayor has to contend with the governor, and Lander is now leading an effort to sue Governor Kathy Hochul over her “pause” of congestion pricing, which Adams supports. “We need congestion pricing so we can reduce traffic, fix the subways, improve the air quality,” Lander told me, “and even though his key leaders say it’s needed, he’s AWOL. That’s the kind of failure to pay attention to the metrics. That’s failure to support the bold ideas the city’s future demands.”
Lander is potentially sacrificing an almost assured second term as comptroller, though he has until roughly January to change his mind and seek reelection. It’s a big personal and professional gamble, though in part, Lander is betting that conditions will be more favorable for him next year than in a potentially wide-open 2029 mayoral race.
“People may or may not believe it, but I was not planning to run for mayor in 2025,” Lander said. “When I’m out in neighborhoods all across the city, people are expressing frustration with the leadership failures of Mayor Adams.” New Yorkers “broadly don’t feel like they’re getting that leadership, and they want it, and I believe I can provide it. And that’s why I’m running.”
