All That and a Bag of Chips
Good, bad, and ugly out of the Adams admin—and much more from around New York
A stalwart group of Abundance NY members is starting a community-led Power Broker book club to meet three times (it’s a long book) over the fall. Express interest in joining here.
Soon we’ll all be breaking for Labor Day weekend, and we want to equip you with the latest gossip from City Hall, Albany, and everywhere in between for your beachside or BBQ chats.
Below, we break it down—from the frontpage news that even those passingly interested in New York politics will want to discuss, down to the wonky updates you can dig into with your most abundance-minded acquaintances.
See you in September!
Corruption—with a Crunch: Headlines from the Mayoral Race
Mayor Eric Adams is in hot water, again.
• Members of his inner circle, including former top advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin, were indicted this week on a raft of charges that “paint a picture of a city for sale,” per the New York Times.
• For example, the administration pulled the plug on a street safety redesign on Brooklyn’s McGuinness Blvd. in 2023 after some loud complaints. Now it turns out it wasn’t just political pressure—it was cold hard cash. Lewis-Martin reportedly got a $2,500 payment and a $10,000 party for canceling the plan and putting countless New Yorkers’ lives at risk.
• As if the indictments weren’t bad enough, Adams advisor Winnie Greco appeared to try bribing a reporter from The City with an envelope of cash hidden in a bag of chips. The Times then reported that these bribes could be part of a bigger pattern.
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo must be grateful for the deflected attention.
• Cuomo has been undertaking a more adversarial approach to Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani as he hovers around 25% in the polls—the strongest foil to the Assemblyman but still quite far behind.
• Unfortunately for Cuomo, that strategy has gotten him mixed up with a MAGA “memelord” who the ex-gov is now working to distance himself from.
• Cuomo is also trying to distance himself from Trump more generally after suggesting at a Hamptons fundraiser that the president would help him clear the field.
Meanwhile, Mamdani is riding high.
• He banked a new wave of grassroots donations, netting him over $1 million from 8,600+ donors over the last filing period.
• Further, his opponents—Cuomo, Adams, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and third independent candidate Jim Walden—may be blocked from coordinating a unified opposition: an early plan for all but the leading opponent to drop out in the fall may run afoul of campaign finance rules requiring returned money for drop-outs.
• Of course, the frontrunner is drawing attacks from the right, on living in a rent-stabilized apartment, on sex work decriminalization, and more. So far, these hits haven’t appeared to do real damage—but that could change.
What’s Happening Beneath the Headlines
Housing is still far too expensive, and the solution set has to be capacious.
• New York City is back to pre-pandemic levels of evictions, averaging 1,500 per month.
• Mamdani’s headline affordability commitment, a rent freeze on stabilized units, would apply only to a minority of the city’s housing stock—doing nothing to help market-rate tenants. Indeed, there are real costs to housing quality and supply that could result from a four-year rent freeze.
• Mayor Adams and his circle, when not (allegedly) bribing reporters or accepting bribes themselves, have made real progress on housing—with last week’s Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan getting the admin over the 100,000 mark for newly allowed units. However, as Comptroller nominee Mark Levine said, we now have to do 50 more rezonings like MSMX.
The mayoral contest isn't the only key race to lead New York now underway.
• Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is termed out of the council, and potential replacements are already jockeying for support. Council Members Julie Menin, Crystal Hudson, and Amanda Farías have been seen by many as leading contenders. Menin appears to be drawing support from the council’s right flank (including Republicans); the open question is whether the council wants a centrist counterweight to a mayor Mamdani or an ally to green-light his vision for change.
• After many months of hitting Governor Hochul on various policy dimensions in anticipation of mounting a primary against her, Congressman Ritchie Torres is now endorsing her. That comes as Hochul has wind her in sails from defending congestion pricing and proposing retaliatory redistricting. However, she may revert to more risk aversion next year ahead of potentially facing a strong Republican challenge.
• Still running against Hochul? Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado. Listen to his justification for running on this week’s episode of Max Politics.
Along the way, the gears of government grind on.
• The city’s public transit and public realm are getting upgrades, with a new phase of the Second Avenue subway underway, a new greenway master plan released, and rat sightings down as trash containerization is up (another Eric Adams win). The streetscape could transform further with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. Waymo got approval to pilot eight self-driving taxis in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
• A rezoning legalizing even more homes than MSMX could be coming to Long Island City before the end of the Adams term; the plan was blessed by Queens Borough President Donovan Richards and will go to the city council over the coming months. Meanwhile, NYCHA is exploring its toolkit to add more homes to the city stock.
• Beyond New York’s physical infrastructure, there’s the human capital and social service providers that we rely on for much of our policy implementation. The mayor has proposed a new system to speed up payments to nonprofits, which are notoriously slow.
What We’re Reading over the Break
• While debates on social media rage about whether the Abundance movement is meant to be an alternative to populism, a few progressive local elected officials took to The Nation to argue that Abundance is actually critical to achieving populist goals.
• Jerusalem Demsas, a longtime writer at The Atlantic who has been transformative in bringing pro-housing ideas to a mainstream audience, launched her own publication—The Argument, "aimed at arguing in favor of what liberalism is for, rather than just what it’s against."
• In Washington Monthly, Will Friedman offers a novel critique of Abundance, suggesting that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s views on community feedback leave out the positive roles civic engagement can play in advancing human flourishing.