Let Your Haters Be Your Legacy Debaters
Abundance reflections on the Eric Adams mayoralty
By now you’ve likely heard the news that Mayor Eric Adams has thrown in the towel.
After previously skipping a Democratic primary he couldn’t win to run on an independent line, Adams has now dropped out of the general, too. (His name will still be on the ballot.)
Commentators from the Rockaways to Riverdale have offered their take on what the announcement means for the mayoral race (probably not much) and their post-mortems on the Adams mayoralty (a net positive for New York, a tragedy of squandered potential, “good riddance”).
Rather than write our own Adams autopsy, we thought we’d share the Abundance New York take on the mayor we would have included in our forthcoming general election voter guide. Now irrelevant as guidance for filling out a ballot, it remains a useful account of the ambivalence many in our community feel towards the now assuredly one-term mayor.
It is shocking that the incumbent mayor is polling in a distant fourth today after winning a tough primary and a landslide general election victory just four years ago. Of course, to anyone who has been paying attention to city politics over the last four years, it is perhaps not surprising.
Adams became the first mayor in modern history to be indicted after federal prosecutors collected evidence of corruption. The charges were dismissed by the Trump administration, but only after federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon quit rather than carry out the president’s directives—characterizing the dropped charges as a quid pro quo benefit to Mayor Adams in exchange for his support of President Trump’s immigration policies.
The corruption scandal, and other charges that hit the Adams inner circle, led to tremendous tumult at City Hall. While Adams cronies were pushed out of the administration, so too were high-quality career civil servants who resigned rather than continue in their roles.
The mayor’s corruption scandals have been interwoven with two other storylines of a disappointing mayoralty: mismanagement of the sprawling apparatus of city government and a growing closeness with the Trump administration that undermines the safety of New Yorkers already under threat.
Adams had an inconsistent approach to budgeting, with severe cuts often reversed under City Council pressure, leading to frustration in negotiation and unpredictability in planning. Service delivery suffered under Adams, with persistent staffing shortages citywide. The mayor also ignored the legally mandated streets plan, failing to build required bus and bike lanes even though he ran on a promise to be the city’s “bus mayor.”
A major challenge for Adams was his handling of a large-scale influx of migrants, with a significant contract given to an inexperienced operator—exemplifying a slapdash and unstrategic approach to governance. This period saw Adams adopt increasingly MAGA rhetoric towards migrants, culminating in directly collaborating with ICE as well as parroting GOP talking points about trans youth. The sense that Mayor Adams would “sell out” New York City to the president only heightened amid rumors that Trump might offer Adams the ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia—though perhaps an ambassadorship to Turkey would be more apt.
The failures of the Adams mayoralty are disappointing for many reasons, but not least because his administration delivered some real progress for New Yorkers.
Most importantly, the city started to truly grapple with the housing affordability crisis under Mayor Adams, former first deputy mayor Maria Torres-Springer, and Department of City Planning leader Dan Garodnick. The city updated the zoning code for the first time since 1961 to legalize more homes throughout the five boroughs, and the current charter commission was charged by the mayor to address skyrocketing rents. The affordability benefits of newly legalized homes have not yet been widely felt by rent-burdened residents, but the progress is laudable and must be continued under the next administration.
Beyond housing, the mayor made strides in sanitation, with trash containerization finally beginning to replace piles of garbage bags on our city streets with the system used by peer cities worldwide. On education, phonics-based reading instruction has been introduced to the benefit of city schoolchildren. And on public safety, New York has enjoyed notable crime reduction. While crime declines have been seen across American cities and are not attributable solely to decisions made by NYPD brass, Adams’s third and final commissioner, Jessica Tisch, has earned respect from many civic leaders.
Adams’s successes and failures both reflect the people he empowers—sometimes high-quality civil servants and, more often, cronies. What of a second Adams term? All signs point to the mayor’s worst instincts winning out: after charges against him were dropped, he brought back scandal-plagued allies like Winnie Greco and Ingrid Lewis-Martin. His forward thinking on the built environment has suffered, too, under new First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, who has blocked critical housing and transit projects.
Eric Adams should be credited with his many real achievements, but there is little indication that he would be willing or able to build on them significantly in a second term. Overall, the pall of corruption and mismanagement hangs inexorably over his administration—evidenced by the mayor’s record-low approval and single-digit polling.
He is not a sensible choice for New Yorkers looking to complete their ballot this November.