Will New York Come Back? Will New Yorkers? The likely next mayor says he’ll lobby all those exiles in Florida to come back, and explains how he’ll reduce crime while restoring trust in police. By Tunku Varadarajan
Like many New Yorkers, Eric Adams plans to head for a warmer climate this winter. But for him it’s a business trip. “On Jan. 2, 2022,” he says, “I’m taking a flight to Florida, and I’m telling all those New Yorkers that live in Florida—I’m telling them, ‘Bring your butt back to New York.’ ”
Long a cold-weather bolt-hole for affluent New Yorkers, Florida became even more attractive last year as it quickly ended its pandemic restrictions. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles estimated this July that 33,500 New Yorkers—many able to work anywhere with an internet connection—had made the move in the preceding 10 months. A real-estate firm’s analysis of postal change-of-address forms counted some 26,000 moves from metro New York to the Miami area in 2020.
Mr. Adams, the Democratic nominee for New York mayor, expects to be sworn in on Jan. 1. He has good reason for wanting to win back erstwhile New Yorkers who’ve voted with their feet. Speaking by phone from the back seat of his car somewhere in his home borough of Brooklyn, he says he believes many of those who moved were “among the 65,000 New Yorkers who pay 51% of our income tax.” That is entirely plausible, given that New York City residents pay state and local income taxes at rates of up to 14.776%, while Florida has no income tax.
“I don’t blame them for leaving,” Mr. Adams says. “New York has become too violent, too bureaucratic, too expensive to do business.” He appreciates their financial contribution to the city: “We have cops on our streets, teachers in our schools and all of the other things because of those high-income-tax earners.” (He’s quick to acknowledge the contribution made, “also, by middle-income earners and even the low-income earners.”)
The election for mayor isn’t until Nov. 2, but Mr. Adams appears to be a shoo-in. Democrats outnumber Republicans 6 to 1 on the city’s voter rolls. Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg won a combined five terms as Republican nominees between 1993 and 2009, but they didn’t leave an effective party behind. Joe Lhota, a former Giuliani aide who was the GOP mayoral nominee in 2013, received less than a quarter of the vote as he lost to leftist Democrat Bill de Blasio. The current GOP nominee, radio host Curtis Sliwa, founded the Guardian Angels anticrime group in the late 1970s.
On the Democratic side, Mr. Adams prevailed as a centrist in a crowded field. He outpolled all rivals in every borough save Manhattan and did especially well in minority neighborhoods. (Mr. Adams, who is black, is serving his second term as Brooklyn borough president.) After 22 years in the New York City Police Department, rising to captain, he positioned himself as the mayoral candidate best equipped to tackle crime—a problem that seemed well under control in the Bloomberg years but has grown worse under Mr. de Blasio.
No one would mistake Mr. Adams for a law-and-order conservative in the Giuliani mode. But neither is he an antagonist of the police. His rhetoric is conciliatory. “On day one,” he says, “I’ll go from borough to borough and have focus groups with my police officers and say, ‘It’s time to hit the reset button. We need each other, the community and the police, and we want to rebuild trust.’ ”
Does “trust,” in his book, mean racial sensitivity? “Yes, I would say that,” Mr. Adams responds. “There’s a lot of deep wounds and scars, and we need to really confront this.”
He wants the city’s cops to start their day with “the same energy fighting the lack of trust” that they muster in their fight against crime. “Too many good officers have been caught up in the behavior of the numerical minority that have done something wrong.” He vows to “rid the department of those who tarnish the shield and the nobility of public protection.”
He’ll likely meet resistance from the officers union, the Police Benevolent Association. He says he doesn’t know of “any documented case where a union leader came forward, even when it was clear that a person had committed a crime, and said, ‘He is not one of us, we will not stand with him.’ ” Mr. Adams wants that to change. “They’re going to have to police themselves now,” he says. “They must redefine their advocacy for their members. They have to say to abusive officers, ‘You’re not going to bring down the nobility of our profession.’ ”
In the primary, he clashed with Maya Wiley —a former chairman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s preferred candidate—over the contentious policy known as “stop and frisk.” Mr. Adams uses the NYPD’s formulation, “stop, question and frisk.” The department sharply curtailed its use after a federal judge held in 2013 that the Bloomberg administration was applying it in an unconstitutionally aggressive manner.
Mr. Adams agrees with that conclusion: “We were abusing it before. We were telling officers at the beginning of their day that they had to fill a quota of stop-and-frisk forms.” Almost a million young people, “black and brown specifically, were targeted,” he says. “So we will never go back to those days.”
Mr. Adams describes “the proper way” to use the tool: “You see someone place a gun in their waistband, and call the police. They come, and stop and question this person. If it elevates to a reasonable suspicion that this person is committing a crime, carrying a weapon, they’ll frisk him.” All of this would be caught on videotape, he says, because all officers have cameras now. “This would allow us to see that this tool is never again abused.”
His approach to education similarly aims for compromise. Whereas Mr. de Blasio and Ms. Wiley have been hostile to private and charter schools and public schools with selective admissions, Mr. Adams says he wants to “scale up excellence.” We can’t “use the type of school as a definition of what system we want,” he says. “It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a private, religious, charter or district school.” He would leave unchanged the admission criteria for existing specialized high schools, which have come under fire for admitting disproportionately many Asian students and few black and Hispanic ones. But he would create five new specialized schools through which “we can diversify the student body. Let’s leave the ones we have already the way they are, because there’s too much emotion, too much political capital, to be wasting four years on”—here he characterizes the admissions dispute by spelling out a four-letter scatological vulgarity.
Conventionally regarded as a political moderate, Mr. Adams prefers to call himself an “upstream progressive,” in contrast with “downstream progressives” like Mr. de Blasio. Downstream progressives, he says, react to crises; upstream progressives take steps to avert them. The former “spend a lifetime pulling people out of the river”; Mr. Adams says he would try to “prevent them from falling in in the first place.”
Mr. Adams experienced a health crisis a few years ago, which he offers as a metaphor for overcoming what ails New York. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2016. His body was ravaged: He was nearly blind, had stratospheric cholesterol and blood-pressure levels, and was told by doctors that nerve damage in his hands and feet could lead to amputation. In desperation, he went to see one last doctor, who recommended a near-monastic vegan diet. Mr. Adams was skeptical. “I’m going blind,” he says with a chuckle, “and this damn guy is telling me to stop eating chicken.”
But he tried, and his vision returned in three weeks. Three months later, “my nerve damage went away, my diabetes went in remission, an ulcer went away, and I dropped 35 pounds.” Instead of popping pills defensively for each of his life-threatening problems, he says, he’d addressed the “underlying cause.”
Mr. Adams merges his metaphors. “My plant-based diet for the city,” he says, “is to govern upstream, not downstream.” What does that mean? He offers a very specific example: An estimated 30% of New York prison inmates have dyslexia, he says. (The figure for the general population is 10%.) “Eighty percent of inmates don’t have a high-school diploma,” he continues, “and 55% have a learning disability. So if we want to decrease crime in our city, how about doing dyslexia screenings in every school?”
He wants similar interventions for even younger children: “In the first 1,000 days of life”—roughly three years—“we determine brain development, the ability of the child to learn. It’s the seed.” Much government spending is in belated response to “our failure of early childhood development.” Mothers in poor communities, he says, should have doulas, professionals who assist them through childbirth. “They should learn the right food that powers their child’s brain. Why wait until the child’s foundation is destroyed, and then look in the 10th or 11th grade to retrieve what we should have fixed in the beginning?”
When I ask Mr. Adams which past mayors he admires, he names three. Fiorello La Guardia (1934-45) had “an on-the-ground, blue-collar mindset. That’s who I believe I am. I’m up at 5 a.m. every morning, meditating, exercising, drinking my smoothie, then giving 12 hours for my city.” David Dinkins (1990-93) “didn’t really get the credit he deserved”—among other things, for going to Albany to secure state money to hire 6,000 new police officers. And Mr. Bloomberg (2002-13) “had the first version of how we should use data to really move our cities forward.”
Mr. Bloomberg went to City Hall as the city was beginning its long recovery from 9/11. On that day, Mr. Adams was a uniformed NYPD officer, a lieutenant in Brooklyn’s 88th Precinct. He was working election duty—the mayoral primary was postponed later in the day—when he saw the Twin Towers crumble. “That night I went down there and saw how devastating it was to all of us.”
But he says there’s “something else that a lot of people don’t acknowledge, and that’s 9/12. To me, 9/12 is the most significant part of this journey.” On that day, “the day after, we got up. New Yorkers got up. Teachers taught. Builders continued to build. We said that we’re not going to crumble.”
A city that “went through 9/11 and recovered can go through Covid and recover,” he says. He wants, “in all modesty,” he says, to “usher in a post-Covid 9/12 in New York City. We have the resiliency. We’re going to continue to move forward.” And he hopes those new Floridians will move back.
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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