Mayor Eric Adams on the Future of New York City

21:58No other mayor's going to court as much as I have, pushing back on the policies. But when we needed the president of the United States to look at a project we had in Sunset Park, a windfall, billions of dollars investment of 500 ,000 homes were going to use the energy, 1 ,500 union jobs. I flew to Washington and sat down with the president and said, Mr. President, we can't have this project destroyed. He lifted the stop work order. That project is now moving forward. That's what mayors of big cities are supposed to do.

22:29Eric Adams:Now, I can pout in the corner and just call the president names and say, well, you know what? People are upset of the outcome of the election. But how does that help New York? How does it help New York to communicate and coordinate to go after dangerous people? We have dangerous Venezuelan gangs in the city. They were forcing women who are migrants and undocumented into prostitution. I coordinated with federal authorities. We took down the 27 gang members. We were able to for gun possession and other dangerous crimes. So it is my job as the mayor of the biggest city in America to sit down and not war with the president, but work with the president to deliver for the people of this city.

23:11This is the perfect segue for me to ask something that might seem slightly random, but actually I think it's relevant because you've recommended before that New Yorkers should read Kash Patel's book all about the deep state. What do you think about the Trump administration's refusal to release the Epstein files?

23:30Eric Adams:I would love to see what's in those Epstein files. You know, I think we all do. You know, I'm eager to look at UFOs. You know, there's so many history. I'm still trying to figure out who killed Kennedy. Well, that was another thing that was promised. What's going on here? Because a lot of people are really confused. Because for years, this was a... It was a campaign promise, basically. Yeah, and then suddenly it's like, it's a hoax. Do you have a guess for what's going on here? Not at all. I don't know if his advisors or security personnel advise otherwise or timing. I have no idea. I look forward to seeing there's so many deep secrets in America that I think we all want to know.

24:09Eric Adams:And it's imperative that as much as we can find out is possible. And I want to talk about Cash's book, which I thought was a good book. People laugh at the terminology of a deep state. But it is. We have people in government who have been in government through presidents, through mayors, through governors. And they're very arrogant. They believe they are the elected. They believe they answer to no one. They believe that they are able to hold up projects that they don't like. And I saw that firsthand as the mayor. And they're connected to reporters. They're connected to prosecutors. And they're connected to be able to write a letter on you in a minute.

24:50They get a story planted in a minute and leaks. And I saw it and how it operates. Now, think about this for a moment. Everybody let it go over their head. The Southern District of New York classified themselves as sovereign. I mean, we need to really think about that as sovereign. There's no sovereign entities in America. Everyone responds to someone. If you believe you have to report to no one, even main justice, you could do whatever you want. That's unacceptable. And I should outrage every American that any entity with that level of prosecutorial power that can really disrupt your life. You know, people didn't read my indictment.

25:31I was indicted for calling the fire department, asking them to do a building inspection, not to pass what I ran on. I ran on making the FDNY respond to businesses that could not open. And they connected it to, well, you had a bunch of upgrades when you paid for your travel. And we're going to now turn that into bribery and we're going to put you in jail for 33 years. Come on. I want to go back to ICE for a second. I take your point absolutely about violent criminals and the need to address them, whether they're migrants or not. But obviously, you know, there's ice raids happening across the country, including nonviolent but undocumented migrants.

26:19New York City has a long history of being a self-designated sanctuary city. Setting aside the sort of violent criminal element, what is the degree to which, you know, this is going to continue presumably going forward, at least to the rest of the Trump administration. What is the degree to which you're inclined to cooperate with the administration on nonviolent, undocumented migrants?

26:41Eric Adams:We don't. We're very clear. And as you mentioned, the city is a sanctuary city. And understand, sanctuary city is not a law. It is a belief that we believe in this city. If you're in New York and you buy a bottle of water and you pay taxes on that, those taxes go to your goods and services. So in this city, if you are documented or not, we don't question you on that. You can go get medical assistance if you need it. Your child will be able to go to school. You can call the police if you're a victim of a crime. You could make sure that you could walk the streets of the city of New York. And that is what our entire belief system is.

27:23Eric Adams:We will never cooperate or collaborate with ICE on civil enforcement. That is against the law. We've never done and we never will. We will coordinate with them when it comes down to criminal enforcement because we need to be very clear on this. And I think this has been distorted. ICE is not a criminal organization. People could dislike. I don't like the IRS taking money out of my pockets, but it's still a federal agency and it's needed to make sure our tax dollars are collected and spent. ICE is not a criminal organization. ICE is a federal law enforcement agency. Our city has determined that parts of their duties we are not allowed to collaborate with.

28:04We respect that and we never will. But I'm going to collaborate with law enforcement agencies, HSI, FBI, ICE, when it comes down to keeping this city safe. These gangs were extremely dangerous and you had others who were committing real crimes in this city. And I don't care if you're documented or undocumented. After 22 years of being in the law enforcement community, I'm going to keep New Yorkers safe. But isn't ISIS definition of a crime that includes basically anyone who entered the country illegally? Right. That's the problem. They're not distinguishing between gang members, violent criminals and people that, you know, are just trying to work.

28:44Eric Adams:Great question. Because it is a crime to enter and remain. That's a crime. We don't collaborate on that. OK. Because it's clear in our law that of certain even crimes of that nature, we will not collaborate in. And so when it comes down to that level of crimes, we will not collaborate. We're very clear on what we will collaborate. But I also want to point this out because it's often ignored. Someone is always pointing a mic in my face and saying, hey, what are you going to do about what ICE is doing? That's a federal agency. I think we're allowing our federal electors off the hook. I don't control the rules of the federal agencies.

29:28I don't have—I have the city council. That's my job, to look at laws, to sign in laws. You know, we're not asking our federal partners enough, hey, guys, what are you doing about this? That's not my job. The enforcement of immigration is a federal authority, not a city authority. I'm going to do my job. I don't control who come across the border. I control who's in the city when they are across the border. And I told President Biden this. I said, listen, we have a porous border. I went down to El Paso. I went down to the Daring Gap, to Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, and I saw the flow and I saw how they were telling people the streets are paved with gold in New York.

30:12Eric Adams:Why don't we control the flow? We have serious population issues across our country. We should be allowing people to come into the country and say, hey, Kentucky need backstress workers in the racing industry. Here's where you're going for three years, and then you could go wherever you want in the country. This is a win-win if we handled it better. We had no control at the border. We were allowing anyone to come through. Now that we see a substantial decrease, we're no longer getting 4 ,000 people a week into the city, which was just not sustainable. Speaking of crime, the crime stats have improved a lot in the last couple of years.

30:51I've been monitoring your war on rats. Joe says he's a single-issue voter on the rat problem. I've been very impressed with the war on rats, and I've looked at the stats on 311 calls for rats, et cetera. On the other hand, the city is still dirty. when I take my kids to the park, only half the time can I expect to be able to, not even half, like find a clean bathroom, elevators at the subway is still like, you know, it's, this is a world-class city. Do we just have, again, sort of going back to the thing, like, is this inevitable that a city like New York City has to have it so that we don't even have clean bathrooms most of the time?

31:29Like speaking, like from a family issue, like public childcare, obviously incredibly be important. But there's all these other things that make it much more difficult, I would think, than it needs to be that I feel like everyone has just come to accept like, you know, we can't have clean bathrooms in a public park.

31:43Eric Adams:I agree with you 100%. I would never accept a city where there's disorder, there's chaos and there's dirt. I just don't. Remember when I came into office? Many people don't realize that. We had encampments in our subway system. It was the worst of the COVID pandemic, but yeah. All over. We're along highways. January and February, I went out, and there's still pictures that someone sent me the other day. I went out and visited people that were living in encampments. And I saw that when I walked in and crawled in the encampments and their boxes and their tents, I saw stale food, human waste, drug palphernalia.

32:20Many of them was dealing with schizophrenic behavior, bipolar. And I went back to the team and said, the city can't live this way. Go look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland. Go look at these other cities. You don't see that here because I had a zero tolerance. And once we dealt with the encampments, once we dealt with the crimes, removing 22 ,000 illegal guns off our streets, 100 ,000 ghost vehicles, illegal vehicles that were running in our streets. Once we dealt with that, now we move into the next layer. We immediately went out to the rodents in our city, which was just really an indicator of just total uncleanliness in the city.

32:57Now we put in place a 1 ,200-person quality of life team, our Q team, we call it, that's going after those nagging issues. I still ride around the streets, 1 a.m., 2 a.m. in the morning, calling my commissioners when I see an encampment or I see overflow trash. They all tell you about those horrific calls that they give from me because we should see

33:18Eric Adams:it before you see it. You deserve a clean bathroom. You deserve to be able to go to a park. when there's no trash on there. You deserve to not have to worry about a rodent running across your feet. This is what you deserve. These are the basic things that we deserve. But we had to deal with the level one issue first, dealing with getting us out of COVID, dealing with crime, and then this unexpected crisis of dealing with the migrants and asylum seekers. You know, people tell us all the time that, okay, Eric, you have to get the migrants and asylum seekers behind you. Everything is okay. It's not.

33:51We spent$7.7 billion. $500 million of that should have gone to chronically absent children. A billion should have gone to building housing for our seniors. A billion should have gone to making sure that we boost up our Department of Sanitation. What I'm trying to share, the long-term repercussions of what we experience is going to have long-term impacts on our city. On the quality of life issues and crime, I got to say, practically every time I'm in Broadway and Lafayette, the station, which is pretty often, there are people shooting up in the corner. I literally went down the stairway the other day and a guy was standing there shooting himself up in the arm and I was three inches away from him.

34:34That was uncomfortable. That happens all the time and no one seems to be doing anything about it. What exactly is the obstacle to improving some of these issues? Is it budget? Is it enforcement? What is it?

34:48Eric Adams:And I hate it. I hate it when I see someone, what we call nodding on the street. Yeah, exactly. I hate it when I see someone. We were up at the hub the other day. We were just in a state of total disrepair until we got in there and zoomed in. We put in place what we call our PAV team and our scout teams. And I spend a lot of time in the subway system. And the goal is how do you talk people off the system? Now, we were able to take 8 ,500 people off our system that was living on our system. But I cannot tell you how much a challenge it is dealing with people who are dealing with severe mental health issues.

35:24They don't know they need care. That is why I was trying to get Albany to pass the involuntary removal bill, because there are people who are harmful to themselves and harmful to others. And we have to take them inside. We have to bring them inside. And many people just have a philosophical disagreement with me on this issue.

35:41Eric Adams:I want to say that if you are using drug use, we need to take you inside. If you are 30 degree weather, you don't have on shoes, you know, you have soil, your clothing, you're yelling and screaming. We have to talk them off the ledge now and hope that they have to build in trust. And the scout team are doing an amazing job, but it takes longer. And you see those repeated offenders over and over again. But our goal is to go after this illegal to shoot up drugs. in public. But when you do a real crackdown, you get a lot of hate that we're criminalizing drugs because addiction is a disease. So we're trying to use the right balance, but we are far more encountering people than others would like us to do.

36:28Eric Adams:We get a lot of complaints because we encounter people who are injecting themselves with drugs, people who are dealing with severe mental health illness. And I got to really ignore that noise for the better overall public safety of the city.

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39:30Eric Adams:We need to build more. And we're at the pre-pandemic levels. Our hotel industry is doing well. I think, you know, to me, in fact, we have 65 million tourists that came in last year. This is still the hot spot. How's New York City, how's this summer shaping up? This summer? From tourism perspective. Not the levels we have. I think some of the conversation around tariffs, some of the conversations impacted our tourism, particularly some of our domestic tourists. We used to get a lot of tourists from Canada. And we never really recovered the way we should have our Asian market. Chinese, they were a major part of our tourism.

40:07Eric Adams:But we're going to bounce back. We had a hit during COVID, and we were able to recover after COVID. And this is still a good product. You know, people want to come in. I love it here. Yes. And we believe the hotel industry is going to continue to grow. You know, some bumps in the road. We're looking at a conversation around what we could do with our hotel tax. Yeah, how do we get more rooms, though? That's the goal. We got to build more. We have to encourage more building. There were certain laws that were put in place previously about getting and receiving the permits to build. We have to do a real analysis of how do we encourage to get more rooms in the city.

40:44I have one more question. Yes. This is my most important one, possibly, and something I've always wondered. A great mystery of our times. But in the course of prepping for this interview, Joe and I watched a lot of your previous interviews, your previous videos. I was watching your famous contraband video. Where in the world did you get a used crack pipe to use as a prop in that video?

41:09Eric Adams:That was an extra remake that video. Oh, okay. To modern times. When I did that first video, for those who are not aware, it was a video showing how you should look in your child's room for drugs. When I did the first video and still today, people say, oh, you know, how can you do that as hard on children? You know, many people don't know that if someone is selling drugs in your home, when the police come, they come in and do a raid, everyone goes. Grandmother, grandfather, children go to ACS. Families are disrupted. And we need to take control of our homes. Now, it may not be in your home. You know, in your home, this is something that you don't have to even worry about or possibly.

41:53Eric Adams:I don't have to worry about it with Jordan, my child. But when you go to many of the inner cities where violence is rampant and drugs are pervasive, when we did that video, the number of responses people gave me was like, wow, I didn't know that. And so that broke crack pipe back then when I did it. It was just about everywhere. Like you see in certain communities, you see needles. Did you just pick one up off the street or something? Off the street. Oh, my gosh. Okay, last question. A bunch of people gave Andrew Cuomo tons of money, and it came up totally short in the primary. You're still running.

42:29Yes. A, would you consider in September dropping out if you're fourth in the polls or third in the polls? And B, why should anyone donate to your campaign or your super PAC, given how ineffective those dollars seem to be in the Democratic primary?

42:43Eric Adams:Well, it wasn't ineffective. In the last filing, we raised 1.5. No, the money given to Cuomo was totally ineffective because he got trounced. So why should anyone feel that any political giving is going to be useful in this environment? And money is important. It's unfortunate. I am probably the only elected official that has stated over and over again, we need to take money out of politics completely. We should give a dollar amount to every candidate that can only spend that dollar amount. And that's it. There's no reason we should be calling up individuals asking for money. But that's the nature of the beast.

43:14Eric Adams:And so when you look at it, those dollars are used for important reasons because television is extremely expensive. Your staff costs money, et cetera. He didn't lose because of the shortage of dollars. He lost because he did not want to be mayor. New York City is not a consolation prize. You know, you step down as governor and then you wake up one day and say, OK, I want to do a consolation prize and run to be the mayor of the city of New York. And it was obvious. You don't come out on weekends. You don't do this. Don't sit down and speak on podcasts, interviews. You live in a bubble. He always lived in a bubble.

43:54Governor's son went on to become AG, went on to become governor. And then there's another pattern that a lot of people are ignoring. What he feels about black men who are elected. Nobody wants to talk about this. He did it to Karl McCall. When Karl McCall ran to be the first black governor, Andrew Cuomo got in the race, sabotaged his campaign. He did it to Charlie King. Charlie King was running to be attorney general, raised five million dollars, was one of the leading candidates. He got in, pushed Charlie King out. He did it to David Patterson. David was going to run for reelection. He decided to sabotage his campaign and moved him out.

44:31Now he's trying to do the same thing for me. And like you said, your audience needs to really understand what happened. I ran for independent. Everyone knew I was running for independent. Everybody thought I was foolish for doing so, not understanding that the only mayors that have won on the independent line were city mayors. We knew that Mondani was going to be on the general election ballot on the Rookins family line. Why did Andrew throw his name into it if he was in the primary? He did it because he thought he could follow the same process that he's done for a long time. So let's look at the polls.

45:03The polls hit him up for 40 points, 40 points. He sent out a poll to his staffers the day before the election that he was up 10 points. He lost by 13 points. How could we trust when you have an unexpected voting environment right now? This vote is going to depend on new voters. And everyone is talking about the energy on the Madonna camp, 9 % of the voters. 2.5 million Democrats haven't voted yet. A million independents haven't voted yet. Several hundred thousand republics haven't voted yet. Never in my history of politics have I seen the energy around the Stop Madani movement. Coming from my bodegas owners, coming from my small property owners, coming from my Jewish community, coming from my former Soviet and socialist bloc constituents that are here right now, so they don't want to go backwards.

45:53So I said it before, if you look at some of the old tapes, I said, this is going to be the most exciting mayoral race in the history of the city. I knew it seven, eight months ago. We're covering politics. That's right. Where were you actually the night of the Democratic primary? And what was your reaction when Mamdani won? Were you like, oh, I expected this because of all the reasons you just laid out about Cuomo?

46:15Eric Adams:I'm trying to think about it. I think I was in the bed sleeping. I knew what the outcome was going to be. I said six months before the primary that Mamdani was going to win. And all I had to do was wake up. I had an early day. I had things to do in the city. I think we had a storm that day. I could have been going around the city looking at some of the rain sites. You know, you think about I always use sports as an analogy. You know, I have the crown. And just the thought that Andrew is going to tell the second sitting mayor, second mayor of color that I should step aside for him. I mean, that's the highest level of arrogance.

46:51You know, during my difficult moments, COVID, migrant asylum seeker, lawfare, I didn't step down, I stepped up. I said I was elected to serve this city. No matter what I had to face, I was going to live up to my commitment. He didn't do that. When it got hot, he left. He abandoned his obligation for the city of New York. I would never do that to the city. I didn't abandon it as a police officer. I'm not going to abandon it as the mayor. you and our producer Kale were the only two who knew six months earlier that I'm done he was going to win Eric Adams thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots really appreciate the chance to chat thank you very much can Joe call you if he sees a rat yeah I will no thank you so much that was a lot of fun thank you thank you enjoyed it

47:48Tracy, I'm glad we finally got a chance to speak to the mayor. I've never talked to him before. No, neither have I. I'm enjoying this transition. I do think it's a really interesting—New York is obviously a really interesting petri dish in which to experiment with a lot of economic policies. And it sort of solidifies a lot of the trends we've been talking about over the years, including affordable housing, taxation, things like that. I liked your question about when is there some magic line from which progressive taxation becomes socialism? Right. And I actually think like this is a question for a lot of people, including Mamdani, et cetera.

48:26Like is there like what actually like constitutes like an acceptable or an ideal level of redistribution? Because obviously, you know, Mayor Adams was talking about, you know, socialism has failed everywhere, as he asserted. And yet an important element of New York City is the money that is raised from wealthy New Yorkers to, as you put it, you know, put money back into people's pockets to make the city more affordable. Right. So at the moment, that's optional. Billionaires can choose to do it. But I mean, if you think it's a good thing, then why not make it, you know, potentially maybe mandatory at some higher level?

49:04Yeah, right. And why does it have to just be billionaires? Because also there are a lot of people who are not billionaires who are also very wealthy and that everyone just talks about billionaires, which I think is an important element of this conversation. You know, I do think that, like, there is this certain degree to which some of the pathologies of the city are just taken as like it's New York City. Yeah, just deal with it. And this is like what you do. So it's like and this is like these are the costs. So, of course, it is going to take years. to figure out whether we're going to use a specific plot of land that is contested and turn it into housing.

49:42Of course, it's going to, there's going to be a certain level of public drug consumption and rats, although the rats have declined and broken bathrooms and stuff like that. It does feel like in the discourse, we just sort of accept that because it's New York City, that there are certain things that are just going to be like subpar or actively hostile. So again, like from a family perspective, like it really is not good at all that it's so hard frequently to find a bathroom in a public area. I will just say here, I mean, other major cities in the world do it differently, right? Like you go to a place like Tokyo, you do not see people nodding off in the street.

50:21And it kind of blows my mind also that New York still has this extremely high tax rate and a lot of these quality of life issues. But anyway. There's plenty more to talk about if you win reelection. We'll have them back on. Well, definitely. We'll definitely have him back on to talk about how all of these things are going. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow Mayor Eric Adams. He's at NYC Mayor. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand.

50:55Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot and Kill Brooks at Kill Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Oddlots, if you enjoy our turn into local New York politics, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there.

51:28Thanks for listening.

51:41Thank you.

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