NEW YORK — In his first year as New York City’s 110th mayor, Eric Adams laid out many a plan.
He promised to chip away at surges in crime that have left New Yorkers fearful. He set the goal of creating 500,000 new units of housing within 10 years. And he instituted belt-tightening measures aimed at staving off projected budget deficits that threaten the Big Apple’s long-term fiscal health.
How’s he doing?
To paraphrase the mayor himself, in this city, we’ve got 8 million people, but 35 million opinions.
“We’re not talking about tinkering around the edges. That’s probably the most, I would say, challenging part of my administration,” Adams said in a recent interview with the Daily News. “I said from day one that is not my goal. The system, you know, our system, our cities — not only New York, but globally — they’re just broken. And you can’t just say I’m going to go after one item, and then I’m going to run around for four years and say, ‘I did this one item.’ No.
“There are foundational changes, and that is so risky because that’s not what we’re used to.”
Adams stepped into a difficult situation 12 months ago. The city was just starting to emerge from the darkness of COVID-19, crime was trending in the wrong direction, and public schools were struggling to make up for educational ground ceded during the pandemic.
If that wasn’t enough, his first month in City Hall reinforced the dire reality of what he’d have to contend with on a day-to-day basis. In January, within days of being sworn in, two NYPD officers were shot dead in Harlem, a woman was fatally shoved in front of an R train, and 17 people perished in a Bronx blaze that marked the deadliest fire in New York City in decades.
“He inherited from his predecessor a budget crisis, a crime crisis, a homelessness crisis, a housing affordability crisis, and the impacts of COVID continue to linger,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic strategist who, like Adams, is a former cop.
In spite of it, Adams has appeared to savor playing the cards he’s now holding, saying recently that he “wouldn’t want this job” if it weren’t for all the trials and tribulations that come with it.
Beyond deep-rooted economic and social crises, those challenges have included Adams’ Buildings commissioner abruptly quitting after his home was searched by federal authorities this fall, controversy around his recently resigned chief of staff, and his friendships with some questionable characters.
Adams’ hiring habits have also raised eyebrows. He tapped Phil Banks, an ex-NYPD chief who resigned in 2014 while under federal investigation, as his deputy mayor for public safety and tried to appoint his younger brother to a six figure-salaried security post (his brother, Bernard Adams, got the job, but in an unpaid capacity).
Crime: Are the streets safer?
One of — if not the — biggest policy challenge from Adams’ perspective is crime.
To address surging gun violence, he reinstated a modified version of the NYPD’s Anti-Crime Unit, a team that was disbanded under former Mayor Bill de Blasio after coming under attack for being overly aggressive. Adams brought it back as what’s now known as the Neighborhood Safety Unit and vowed there would be a zero-tolerance policy on cops violating people’s civil rights.
In 2022, shootings decreased by 17% and murders were down 12% — but crime spiked in other areas overall, despite some recent improvements.
“The problem is every other major crime is up and that is very concerning,” said Liz Glazer, the former director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice under de Blasio and founder of Vital City, a journal dedicated to public safety issues.
Robbery, burglary and grand larceny in particular skyrocketed in 2022, respectively up 26%, 23% and 26% as compared to the same time in 2021, NYPD data show. Public safety concerns have also been fueled by a rash of high-profile random attacks, including multiple incidents on the subways.
Adams has sought to address subway crime by dispatching hundreds more cops to patrol trains and platforms, but his administration has yet to unveil any specific initiatives aimed at cracking down on the increases in other crime categories.
“There are a lot of things to admire, but there seems to be this pattern of announcing things without the operations really behind them,” Glazer said.
Fewer people living on the streets?
One example of that is the mayor’s recent announcement regarding the city’s approach to removing mentally ill people who pose a risk to themselves and others from public. Once detained by police, if deemed by a doctor to be a risk, those people would require inpatient care — but critics pointed out there are a dearth of hospital beds in the city dedicated to the mentally ill.
Aside from a few dozen beds set aside by Gov. Kathy Hochul for that end, Adams hasn’t had much else in the way of detail to offer on that front.
From Adams’ perspective, the goal of more clearly delineating that policy, as well as his policy of clearing away homeless encampments, is twofold: provide care to people in need and address the feeling among some that the city has become a hotbed of disorder.
“We wanted to get people help,” Adams told The News. “And we wanted to clean up the visual presence of a city that was dirty and that was disorderly.”
Norman Siegel, a veteran civil rights attorney who has advised Adams informally for years, credited Adams with attempting to craft policies expanding access to mental health services, but he panned the mayor’s plan on involuntary commitment.
“I called him and we went at it for a while. I didn’t hold anything back and told him he was wrong,” Siegel said. “It creates distrust for the people out on the streets, and if you look at the history of involuntary commitment, it’s incredibly destructive.”
He urged Adams to instead focus on expanding the use of so-called safe haven and stabilization shelters, where homeless people are typically able to have their own rooms and access a slate of services.
A big part of the problem Adams faces when it comes to homelessness is the city’s shortage of affordable housing, and to a lesser extent market-rate housing.
Housing: More affordable?
In his first year, the mayor has notched some wins on that front, though much of the overall picture remains murky.
In June, Hochul signed into law a policy that allows the New York City Housing Authority to issue bonds to pay for repairs and construction, a measure that both the mayor and advocates had demanded. Since then, the City Council has approved several affordable housing developments — including projects in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — that the Adams’ administration supported. In December, Adams announced his goal of creating 500,000 new homes in a decade, as well as plans to revamp the city and state’s zoning rules to help reach it.
“Across the board, they have an agenda that’s pretty clear. The problem is that much of the agenda requires state approval,” said Partnership for New York City President Kathy Wylde. “The question is how do you break the logjam.”
To enact many of his housing goals, Adams will need rezoning changes that must go through Albany. His relationship with Hochul is a marked improvement over the openly hostile one de Blasio and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo shared, but Adams has at times been at odds with lawmakers in Albany.
Despite the agenda-setting and some of the goals achieved, critics charge Adams is doing exactly what he vowed not to do — tinkering around the edges.
Michael McKee, a longtime affordable housing advocate and treasurer of the Tenants PAC, said the so-called affordable housing developments that have so far been approved under Adams rely heavily on market-rate housing and that the Rent Guidelines Board decision in 2022 to set rents higher for rent-stabilized apartments was a step backward.
While Adams is not directly involved in making those decisions, he does appoint members to the Rent Guidelines Board.
“The rent increases were really excessive,” McKee said.
The broader dilemma of sufficient affordable housing has also been magnified by a large influx of migrants who’ve come to the city from border states like Texas, leading Adams to plead with the state and federal governments for more aid and to battle with the City Council over how to best address the crisis.
Budget crisis: Massive shortfall looms
As COVID-19 has to some extent receded into the background, the city’s fiscal health, which started to emerge as a concern during de Blasio’s tenure, has become perhaps the city’s biggest long-term problem.
City budget watchdogs say New York is looking at nearly $10 billion in budget shortfalls in the years ahead, gaps fueled by dwindling federal relief money that began flowing to the city due to COVID-19, a cooling off of the stock market that’s hurting city pension funds and a projected decrease in city tax revenue.
The mayor has publicly addressed it through attrition and other departmental cost-saving measures, but it’s still not clear how effectively he’ll be able to tackle projected budget gaps in the years to come.
Andrew Rein, head of the Citizens Budget Commission, lauded Adams’ administration for taking some “good first steps” when it comes to the city’s fiscal health, but noted ominously that “there still has not been a substantive run at restructuring government to be more efficient.”
“If we don’t get a handle on spending now in the right way, we’re going to end up having to cut spending later in the wrong way,” he said. “If you start today, you can preserve services, run them more efficiently. If you wait till tomorrow, you cut services at the time New Yorkers need them the most.”
Some of those service cuts could hit the NYPD, the city’s social services agencies and schools, which already suffered greatly during the pandemic.
Schools: Budget woes threaten progress
Adams’ policies when it comes to education and the city’s youth have in many ways reflected a personal mission, but their effectiveness in many ways also remain to be seen. The mayor and his schools chancellor, David Banks, have introduced programs focused on literacy, healthy eating and careers.
Adams, who suffered from diabetes and is dyslexic, introduced screenings for the learning disability and promoted an overhaul of the reading curriculum. A champion of a plant-based diet and someone who’s touted himself as business friendly, he also rolled out “Vegan Friday” school lunches and invested millions into private-sector student apprenticeships.
But his first year has not been without controversy when it comes to education.
Declining school enrollment, coupled with Adams’ policy to scale back federal stimulus spending to avoid a fiscal cliff when that aid expires, sent local schools into budgetary bedlam ahead of this fall.
Principals sent teachers and staff packing and slashed extracurricular activities — while advocates harangued the mayor over hundreds of millions of dollars cut from school-level budgets. The cuts became a flashpoint in the City Council, whose members accused the administration of misleading them during negotiations.
Adams also reversed policies from the de Blasio era that nixed accelerated programs. He expanded Gifted & Talented programs and selective admissions at high schools, but let local districts make that call for middle schools. Plans to expand preschool for 3-year-olds were scaled back under Adams’ watch too.
“It’s government by press conference and a slow rollout of initiatives,” said David Bloomfield, a professor of education law and policy at Brooklyn College. “They should’ve been hitting the ground running. I feel the ‘work in progress’ rhetoric is not credible, because they should’ve had a plan in January.”
