Bragging Rights
I got an early copy of Michael Wolff's new book about the last days of the Trimp presidency, and wrote about some of its juicier bits of gossip for the Daily Beast.
Back on the New York City beat, we had a long conversation on FAQ NYC with Alvin Bragg, the Democratic nominee who's all but certain to be Manhattan's next district attorney, about the (apparently flimsy) case against the Trump Organization and probe of Trump he'll inherit, and how he intends to reshape the office.
And I wrote for the Daily News about the big ideas from the Democrats he defeated that Eric Adams should claim as his own now.
Eric, please steal these ideas: The best proposals Adams should adopt from other mayoral candidates
When you glance at the drones flying overhead before stepping into your new self-driving car paid for with cryptocurrency in 2022, don’t forget to thank Eric Adams, who eked out a Democratic primary win that will almost surely make him New York City’s 110th mayor elected on a blue-collar promise to deliver a safer and more broadly prosperous city but who’s also bubbling over with big ideas.
“I’m going to promise you in one year,” Adams said, that “you’re going to see a different city (as) we’re going to become the center of life science, the center of cybersecurity, the center of self-driving cars, drones, the center of Bitcoins.”
The devil remains in the details, of course, but it’s nice to look ahead to a mayor who seems like he can walk and chew gum at the same time after eight years of an exhaustingly on-message bore, who got run over by the villains of Uber at one point while trying to carry the water of his villainous medallion-owning backers and who never seemed to have much of a clue about what the city should be doing about big-tech schemes to disrupt housing and driving and delivery and just about everything else here.
It’s striking that Adams brought up his own big ideas in his victory lap just after a primary in which no candidate had a proposal that matched Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-K vision in 2013 for its transformative nature. But they each had a raft of policy ideas, including many I hope don’t disappear along with the primary, that Adams can claim as his own or that the new City Council can push on him. Here are a few of my favorites from a long list of worthwhile plans:
From Kathryn Garcia: End single-family zoning to allow duplexes and triplexes everywhere in the city. Garcia correctly tied that idea together with some important ideas that Adams already supports, including legal basement apartments and, crucially, the Single Residence Occupancies or SROs that provided affordable shelter for generations of single adults here who otherwise might have ended up homeless and who presently make up one-third of all the households in the city. (On the zoning shift, writer Alex Yablon has offered what should be a motto for everyone who wants to see New York build its way toward affordability: “people should have the right to stay in their homes, but not the right to stop new homes accommodating more people.”)
Also, containerized garbage collection to finally achieve the dream of a city that doesn’t smell like a sewer every summer, and where the streets aren’t lined with leaking, oozing trash bags for rats to feast on — a natural fit for Adams, who famously held a press conference as borough president with buckets of dead rats while promoting a better trap.
From Shaun Donovan: Equity bonds to provide kids who start off with less in life a small nest egg of their own by the time they turn 18. It’s an ambitious and expensive idea, that really could help do something about a wealth gap in the city, and the nation, that’s only grown over generations.
From Andrew Yang, among others: A vacant land tax that presses owners to either develop or sell their vacant lots and parking lots and other “underused” parcels that could be developed into housing. Ideally, this would go along with a pied-à-terre tax, which would need to pass in Albany, as part of a push to make as much housing as possible here actually go toward housing New Yorkers, rather than letting various classes of property remain vacant or badly underused while serving as unproductive instruments of financialized speculation.
There’s lots more, including Maya Wiley’s idea of expanding midwife and doula services citywide, Scott Stringer’s plans to reshape a city bureaucracy that’s brutal on small businesses, too often treating them as revenue sources and forcing them to hire expensive “fixers” to get navigate the government that’s supposed to be serving them, Ray McGuire’s vision of a 10,000-tutor corps of college students and recent grads to help get every child reading at grade level by the end of third grade, and Dianne Morales’ proposal to make CUNY free again.
Adams criticized some of these ideas from his rivals in the course of the campaign, and has plenty of his own to draw from starting with those in his ″100+ Steps Forward for New York,” pamphlet that Josh Greenman recently wrote about online in these pages, noting the “deceptive simplicity” of many of his penciled-in proposals.
But he can take a second look now that he’s the victor and the Democratic standard-bearer in service to his promise to better share the spoils of the city’s prosperity with ordinary New Yorkers.
So long as a Mayor Adams keeps his eyes on the streets, he’ll keep replenishing the political capital he needs to dream of and do big new things.
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