Halfway through a mayoral term that he felt preordained by larger forces than he, Mayor Adams is in a tough spot. Much of the oxygen of his first two years in office has been taken up by an issue that nobody would have predicted could have loomed as large at the outset: the arrival of more than 160,000 migrants in the city, more than 65,000 of whom remain in our care.
There are few easier ways to make yourself unpopular than to aggressively cut budgets; everyone has programs they like, and people across the political, social and geographic spectrums will find some cuts to take exception with. Adams’ hand was in some sense forced here, not just by the significant costs of caring for asylum seekers but by the sharp upward trajectory of city spending in the past several years, buoyed both by economic boom times and then the federal assistance that poured in during the bad times of COVID.
Now, Uncle Sam has gotten stingy about lending a hand during a totally different situation, one set off in part due to the machinations of an unscrupulous red-state governor and the city’s own unusual obligations to its homeless population, and the bills are all coming due. Adams is the one who has to deliver the bad news, which makes him the bad guy.
While bringing down crime has been Adams’ No. 1 goal and he has done quite well on it, ever rising NYPD overtime — with OT for subway cops alone now totaling more than six times the savings from library reductions has hurt his budget, making cutbacks worse. So has the use of cuts across the board, as opposed to the City Council and others’ push for more targeted trims, while continuing to spend top dollar on expensive emergency contracts, some going to companies with rather spotty records.
Missteps aside, though, it’s not clear how exactly this mayor, or any mayor, could have satisfactorily dealt with a migrant situation that doesn’t seem to have any good answers. Yes, we and others have advocated for more concerted efforts to integrate these folks into the city’s economy and set them more quickly on their feet via bigger investments into legal and social services, and we’ve criticized City Hall for slowness in embracing alternate housing solutions like the use of houses of worship.
Yet at the end of the day, the mayor of New York cannot control international migration patterns — despite Adams’ attempt to influence them — or grant work authorizations, has no global refugee apparatus to coordinate arrivals nor the cooperation of opportunists like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, possesses no treasury with which to simply print more money. Scant help from his friends in Albany and Washington have only made it harder.
As all-encompassing as migrants have become, beyond the budget implications, it’s not an issue that most New Yorkers are really interacting with. When all is said and done, there’s no doubt that Adams will want to be remembered as more than the mayor who dealt — poorly or competently — with a surge in asylum seekers.
It will be this second half of the term that will now define the mayor’s more legacy-oriented objectives, perhaps chief among them his efforts to, in some broad and lasting way, counteract that housing shortage that has become NYC’s never-ending emergency.
Here, too, Adams inherited a mess, decades’ worth of housing construction falling below what was necessary to keep up with demand that grew along with the city’s economic rebirth in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. A brief blip of falling rents during the COVID-era exodus served mainly to highlight just how wildly rents would rise on the tail end. The climb was blunted a little towards the end of this year, but still leaves us with median rent prices at $4,000 for Manhattan and not much lower elsewhere.
No one approach will fix this, especially in a city where unfortunately too many people are still reflexively opposed to development without understanding that it is the only thing that can reliably bring prices down and ward off excessive gentrification. Yet the mayor’s ambitions are to tackle the problem with a thousand cuts via his “City of Yes” initiatives, designed to, in small ways and big, make it easier to both build and preserve housing.
Adams has also thrown his chips in with the idea of residential conversions of underutilized commercial space and more stringently going after landlords who might be hoarding empty apartment space. Gov. Hochul’s rather ambitious housing plan was strangled by a recalcitrant Legislature, but we hope the Council can work with Adams to make these dreams a reality. One bright spot in his record will be presiding over the development and growth of the Public Housing Preservation Trust, which can chart a new future of better housing for the city’s hundreds of thousands of NYCHA residents.
After years and years of failed promises of his predecessors, this mayor has the opportunity to do the right thing on Rikers, which means accepting the difficult reality that the system won’t right itself no matter who he puts at the helm. It’s time to drop the resistance and let a court-appointed outside manager come in and right the ship; doing so could make Adams the mayor who finally put a stop to the cycle of death and violence that has been a stain on the city for decades.
Adams is also probably the first mayor during whose mandate the practical realities of climate change have gone from largely theoretical to very much here, and he’s probably the last mayor to be able to focus mainly on fortification and resilience as opposed to pure reaction to climate catastrophes. He must lay the groundwork.
In the background of all this important government work is a federal criminal investigation that is looking at Adams’ political campaign, having raided the home of one of his top fundraisers and he had his cell phones examined and copied by the FBI, a serious step that would require high-level sign-off from the Department of Justice. Adams says that is not distracted by the probe and he can focus on the job he was elected to do.
He will need that determination to keep going on his success in pushing down crime and encouraging evermore job creation while dealing with the remaining challenges before him and the 8 million New Yorkers he works for.
The former cop, state senator and borough president has long had a tendency to describe his 2021 election in transcendental terms, prompting plenty of eye-rolling among supporters and detractors alike. Yet it’s true that every mayor has an opportunity to make an positive indelible mark on the greatest city on Earth. With these next two years, the mayor has a chance to do so on multiple fronts.
from New York Daily News https://ift.tt/oPkV4Qf