Zohran Mamdani, mayor since midnight, must learn from the mistakes of Eric Adams, whose record of significant achievement was undermined by too many scandals for one administration to handle.
On crime, Adams did preside over a steep reduction that puts us now near the lowest level of homicides in the city’s history. The fruits of this approach have been evident enough that Mamdani has decided to keep Commissioner Jessie Tisch at the NYPD.
It took Adams going through a few commissioners to get to Tisch, but he ended with a winner and Mamdani wanting her to continue is a ratification of her success, a success that would not have been possible without Eric Adams giving her the job.
On housing, Adams’ performed a near miracle in getting approval of a massive rewrite of the city’s zoning resolution, which hadn’t been changed since 1961. Called the City of Yes, it will make a real difference for our long-standing dearth of affordable housing. Adams had carefully shepherded it through an often-recalcitrant City Council and through the gauntlet of demands coming from both the real estate lobby and pro-housing advocates.
Like with the cops, Mamdani is keeping Adams’ housing czar, Leila Bozorg, and promoting her to deputy mayor. That’s another ratification for a big success.
Another huge win was the elimination of the thousands of unlicensed weed shops which were everywhere and now are all gone. Thank Adams for that.
Adams faced an impossible situation with the bad-faith efforts of red-state Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and the inaction of the Biden administration to create what was the defining crisis of migrant arrivals. Adams stumbled at times and had some false starts, but we came out the other side of it with our municipal government chugging along and, in the long-term, many of these new arrivals slowly integrating into the fabric of New York as generations have before them.
However, the totality of Adams legacy will always have the tarnish of his poor decision-making, ranging from the petty corruption that didn’t result in a criminal prosecution only due to the fact that the Trump administration let him off the hook because they wanted him to help them on immigration enforcement, to the insistence on bringing the Borough Hall culture to primetime, characterized especially by a reliance on long-time pals.
The chummy clubhouse atmosphere could have flown in an environment that was far more ceremonial and the subject of significantly less scrutiny, but it was never going to gel with the high-stakes reality of running the most important city in the nation, one of the premier global metropolises with a budget and workforce rivaling that of many small countries.
From Ingrid Lewis-Martin’s alleged freewheeling glad-handling and meddling into affairs concerning litanies of private-sector connections to his old buddy Tim Pearson steamrolling experienced agency staff, the most acute lesson of the Adams years is that you’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to the outgoing mayor; after all, many of us tried to warn him from the beginning.
Had Adams avoided scandal, his major accomplishments would have earned him a second term starting today. Instead, he’ll be in attendance on the City Hall steps for a mayoral inauguration, but it is for Mamdani, not him, because his chances for another four years were fatally undermined by his problems.
