Eric Adams Absolutely Loves Being Mayor. Does New York Love Him Back?

Adams, who grades his first-year performance as a B-plus, has concentrated day-to-day operational power amongst a handful of close associates, particularly Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his chief adviser, and Sheena Wright, the recently promoted first deputy mayor. Wright is engaged to David Banks, whom Adams selected as schools chancellor. For deputy mayor of public safety, Adams chose David’s brother, Philip Banks III (in 2018, federal prosecutors described Banks as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a bribery scheme; the investigation yielded several convictions, but Philip has consistently denied any wrongdoing). Adams did drop the idea of hiring a younger brother as a $240,000-a-year deputy police commissioner after ethical questions were raised. Such qualms haven’t interfered with the mayor’s after-hours relationships, however: His favorite restaurant is run by two friends of his who are convicted felons. Adams has frequently seemed irritated by the media attention paid to his travels and his pals, but at the moment he’s shrugging it off as part of the game. “I love the reporters,” he says. “They’re going to push back on me. I’m going to push back on them. Anyone that feels as though, well, they’ve treated Eric specifically unfair—man, they treat everyone unfair!”

An early-December Siena College poll showed Adams with a 50% favorability rating amongst city voters. Most of the mayor’s constituents are likely to overlook the cronyism and the dubious associates if Adams can deliver on his main promise—to create a safer, more prosperous, and more equitable city. The mayor has recently scored a pair of wins in Queens, where two private development projects he backed are expected to include nearly 4,000 below-market-rent apartments, though they may not arrive for a decade. On the other hand, his campaign vow to convert 25,000 hotel rooms into apartments has fizzled, in large part because of pushback from the hotel workers union, a key supporter of candidate Adams last year. Crime statistics were finally trending down in November, even though Adams’s biggest tactical change, reviving the anti-crime unit—to seize illegal guns—has yielded only modest gains, something demonstrated painfully on Wednesday morning, when Adams’s year-end speech about public safety was delayed by the shooting of a Brooklyn cop who had responded to a report of a domestic dispute. And Adams may need to resolve the intrigue at police headquarters, where insiders talk about Commissioner Keechant Sewell as a figurehead and say the department is mostly being run by Philip Banks. 

Adams laughs at the suggestion that Sewell isn’t in charge. “Keechant is no joke. She will not be a figurehead,” he says. “I needed a deputy mayor [in Phil Banks] that will coordinate and be the maestro for all the [law enforcement agency] instruments that we’re playing. It was probably one of the best moves that I made.”

The city’s business community, a key ally, seems to remain staunchly in the mayor’s corner. “He’s been a breath of fresh air,” says Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, an influential business advocacy group, who points to new public-private partnerships in education and homeless outreach. “He has engaged the business community in a way they have not been since the Bloomberg era. I mean, we did nothing for eight years with Mayor [Bill] de Blasio. I think he called us once to ask for help getting mayoral control of the schools past the state legislature.” 

Adams will need all the support he can muster in his second year. Contracts with several major labor unions, including those representing municipal workers, teachers, and police officers, have either expired or will soon. In addition to the sweeping mental health and affordable housing initiatives, his flurry of year-end announcements has included a “New” New York plan, crafted with Governor Kathy Hochul and light on specifics, to retool commercial sections of midtown Manhattan into live-and-work neighborhoods. Now Adams needs to follow through on the nettlesome details, which will require cooperation from both Albany and the city council. Amanda Farías, a city councilmember who represents a Bronx district that could eventually see hundreds of new affordable apartments built with the Adams agenda, says she’s highly encouraged by what she’s seen so far. “The developers and the city will need to engage community feedback on the housing plans,” says Farías, who chairs the council’s economic development committee. “But what the mayor has done well is prioritize the city’s economic recovery, and he’s hired some really great people to make it happen, like Maria Torres-Springer,” the deputy mayor for economic and workforce development. 

Other integral pieces of the city’s bureaucracy, however, had a rougher start in the administration’s first year. “Because he didn’t have enough staff at the city’s housing agency, he wasn’t even able to spend all the money he had in the capital budget to build affordable housing,” says Rachel Fee, executive director of the New York Housing Conference. “We saw a 43% decrease in affordable housing starts between the last year of the de Blasio administration and Mayor Adams’s first year, during a housing crisis.”

Adams is an adept politician. He’s intent on staying in touch with his Black, middle-class base, and he’s shrewd about keeping his antagonists, particularly Democrats to his left, on the defensive. Yet the most unlikely accomplishment of Adams’s first year as mayor is that he has ignited flickers of nostalgia for his predecessor. “Say what you will about de Blasio—he could be a jackass—but he actually wanted to help people,” a former Adams administration official says. “He put people in charge of agencies who had well-thought-out plans to help people.” 

By the end of de Blasio’s first year as mayor, in 2014, he had, after high-decibel battles with then governor Andrew Cuomo, succeeded in creating a universal pre-kindergarten program. After almost 12 months in office, Adams can’t point to any similar distinct success—and he has seemed dismissive of chasing a big, singular achievement. Back in June, as he rode the subway for three overnight hours to get a firsthand look at conditions underground, Adams told a New York Post reporter that former mayors were misguided in concentrating on a “pet project.” “You know, they hold on to this one thing,” he said. “That’s why when people try to say, ‘Okay, Eric, you know, what is your one or two things?’, I’m saying: ‘To fix this mess!’” 

Fixing everything that’s wrong with New York City government is an admirable objective. The risk in pursuing it is that Adams ends up with no focus and fixes nothing. The mayor waves off that notion. “The number one thing I heard from people [coming into office], they said, ‘Just pick three things and try to be good at those three things and just ride those three things out.’ And that is just not my goal. Government is broken in this city and in this country, and we can do a better job and produce a better product. And I’m going to swing for the fences.”