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

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With a jam-packed travel calendar, an administration of close allies, and a media-savvy strategy, Eric Adams has slipped comfortably into his position of power. But will a force of personality be enough to address the city’s many challenges?

By Chris Smith

December 23, 2022

Eric Adams speaks at a New York City primary mayoral election night party in New York City U.S. June 22 2021.nbsp

The massive New York Hilton ballroom is sold out. Roughly 950 people are packed around tables densely covered with bottles of wine and crystal and flowers. The diners are members and friends of the New York Building Congress, the powerful lobbying group for the city’s construction and development industry, gathered for its annual recognition gala. The partiers rise in a standing ovation as the next speaker strides to the podium, resplendent in a cobalt blue suit. “There is only one consistent rule that I live by: You do not stand for me. I stand for you. I serve you…My life is dedicated to responding to the needs of this city,” the speaker, Mayor Eric Adams, says. “I was in Qatar and Greece, and I met some of the top leaders there, and they said, ‘When we think of America, we think of America and then New York.’ New York is an entity of its own. And sometimes we allow those who are naysayers in the headlines to beat us down and make us feel that we are not something special. Like hell we aren’t! We are special! This is a special place, New York City!” The crowd roars with approval as he continues, shouting, “It is never lost on me that I am the most important mayor in the most important country on the globe! On the globe!”

This is Adams at his best. The cheerleader in chief, the booster of the five boroughs, the municipal master of ceremonies. The show goes on every day, at all hours; after he’s done at the Hilton in midtown Manhattan, Adams races to a banquet hall sparkling with mirrors and chandeliers and poinsettias in a working-class central Bronx neighborhood. He’s there to speak at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s year-end dinner. This time the mayor keeps his remarks short but poses for every requested selfie, until his security detail nudges him out the door. If this night is like others in the past year, Adams isn’t done, but headed down to hold court with the hedge fund crowd at Zero Bond.

“I love every day being mayor,” Adams tells me. “I don’t wake up saying, ‘Woe is me.’ I wake up saying, ‘I have to solve this issue today.’ And I love every moment of it because I see it as I’m impacting the lives of people.”

After nearly one year at City Hall, he’s got the public relations side of the job down. Besides roaming New York from the Rockaways to Rikers Island, Adams has promoted the city and himself everywhere from Washington (eight trips, often to lobby Congress or Biden administration officials) to Baton Rouge and Chicago (public-safety events) to Miami (a crypto conference) to Los Angeles (a panel on “digital transformation” and a coincidental commiseration with Dave Chappelle after the comedian was attacked onstage) and Doha (where the mayor met with a Qatari investment group and caught two World Cup matches). In a press conference before leaving for Greece and Qatar, he even had fun with questions about who was footing parts of the travel bill: “When I do my dime, I can do my time, and I don’t want to hear anyone whine.”

As for the nuts-and-bolts parts of running city government, the rookie mayor’s record is considerably more mixed. “His ideas are fine,” a senior New York political official tells me. “But the execution on basic stuff is just not there.” For instance, at the end of November, after months of increases in homelessness statistics and a spate of ugly confrontations, Adams announced an ambitious program to remove people from the streets and hospitalize them involuntarily. At the press conference immediately afterward, the mayor was asked how many open mental health beds existed in city hospitals. He didn’t know. “I’m not aware that there are long waiting lists,” Adams said; there are, with more than 1,000 people in need.

Later, in conversation, Adams demonstrates a command of details across city government, says that he’s installing the structures that will finally turn New York’s housing tide, and claims that his out-of-town travels are paying off for the city in ways big and small. “I’m a big believer in, you have to inspect what you expect or it’s all suspect,” he says. “I’m a computer programmer by nature, and I know that you have to build systems that allow you to see, are you moving in the right direction?” Adams grumbles about the “naysayers,” who he says “look for reasons to get in the way of where we could go.” But he never shies away from projecting confidence. “Back at the beginning of the year, I said we’re getting all of the encampments out of our subway system. We put a system in place; we monitor it every week. We’ve been able to narrow it down to the stubborn people we’re having a problem with, and we need to get them more services. That is how you get to a destination, through that inspection,” he says. “While I was in LA, I moved around the city to look at their encampment problem, their homeless problem, on the ground. I knew when I got back here, we are not going to turn into that. If you don’t get on the ground and see what’s happening in these locales, you’re not going to get the full picture.”

A full portrait of his first year shows Adams contending with nonstop challenges, to uneven results. This fall the administration changed course several times when thousands of migrants arrived in the city, a problem that had been building since early summer. New York’s economic recovery from the pandemic has lagged, widening projected budget deficits in 2024 and beyond. City agencies have been hampered by staffing shortages. A state court found that the city had broken the law in how it cut the public school budget by $200 million. Chatter about infighting at City Hall is widespread, while cops are leaving the NYPD in numbers not seen in two decades, at a time when crime in every major category, other than murder, is up significantly. And Adams’s crypto-industry-promoting stunt of converting his first paycheck into Bitcoin and Ethereum came just as the market plunged, possibly costing him money.

During his eight years as Brooklyn borough president, Adams demonstrated great talent for drawing attention while building a reputation for running a freewheeling office and assembling a small, loyal inner circle. Those qualities seem to have been largely transferred to the much glossier stage at City Hall. “Managing government isn’t what he came here to do,” a Democratic operative who knows Adams well says. “I think he came here to build the legend of Eric Adams and be introduced to cool, wealthy, powerful, famous people and have a good time. I’m not talking shit. That’s just who he is. He’s thriving within the media atmosphere because he’s very savvy about displaying his personality in a way that has allowed him to mask a pretty vacant agenda. Though that’s changed some in recent weeks.”

Adams, unsurprisingly, vigorously disputes the notion that he’s more about style than substance. “I’m probably one of the few mayors that came up through the civil service system,” he says. “I understood the delivery of goods and services and all the things that you really don’t understand about agencies if you’re coming from the outside. Then you match that with, for 28 years—when I first decided I was going to run for mayor—I started doing these daily journals, writing down every night my observations. So I came into this office with a clear plan, and the entire team is focused around that plan.”

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!”

Eric Adams receives the Civic Leadership award for his commitment to fighting antisemitism in Athens, Greece. 30th Nov, 2022.

By Nikolas Georgiou/ZUMA Press/Alamy.

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.”