Mayor Adams laid out an agenda for his sophomore year in office Thursday centered on improving New Yorkers’ “quality of life” by expanding health care access, building more housing, making streets cleaner, and locking up the city’s “most wanted” criminals.
Adams, whose first year as mayor was characterized by a heavy focus on public safety, unveiled the wide-ranging policy blueprint in his second State of the City speech at the Queens Theatre in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
Many of his most ambitious promises — such as free health care for homeless people and increased housing construction — were light on funding and logistical details. Given that Adams is pressing for budget cuts at a variety of city agencies, some critics thereby questioned the feasibility of his ideas.
But Adams said the 2023 plan will build on the “vision” of his first year, with a focus on four pillars: “Jobs, safety, housing and care.”
“Without these pillars of support, cities crumble, institutions fall, society weakens. We will not allow that to happen in New York,” Adams told the packed Queens Theatre crowd after vowing to usher in a “working people’s agenda” for the city.
Adams said that agenda must be built on a foundation that addresses ground-level concerns like “crime, rats, trash and traffic.” When those issues aren’t tackled, he said, “it is working-class New Yorkers that suffer most.”
To that end, Adams said he’s relaunching the expansion of the city’s organic composting program — with a goal of making it available in all neighborhoods in all five boroughs within 20 months.
In addition to reducing the city’s carbon footprint, composting will help improve street cleanliness, he said. That, in turn, will help eradicate rats, pests Adams has called “Public Enemy No. 1? and whose population in the city has surged since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Referring to a school of dolphins recently spotted in the Bronx River, Adams quipped: “That’s the future of our city — more dolphins, fewer rats.” The line drew laughs.
Another bread-and-butter concern Adams vowed to tackle is employment. The city still hasn’t recovered all jobs it has lost during the pandemic, and the mayor said that’s in part because disadvantaged communities aren’t given enough opportunities.
To address that, he announced a goal of placing 30,000 New Yorkers in apprenticeship programs in sectors like tech by 2030. He also committed over the next four years to awarding $25 billion in city contracts to businesses owned by minorities and women.
With the city’s housing crisis deepening due to skyrocketing rents and a diminishing stock of affordable apartments, Adams pledged to double down on efforts to rezone Midtown Manhattan in such a way that vacant office spaces in the area can become residences.
He didn’t elaborate on how he’d advance the complex rezoning push or what he plans to do to ensure new housing is affordable. But he said he’s investing $22 million in tenant protection efforts, like hiring more staff to crack down on “bad landlords” who evade rent regulation laws.
Turning to the issue he has been most consumed with since becoming mayor, Adams said he will keep fighting crime with “evidence-based solutions.”
Though the city’s murder and shooting rates have dropped since the NYPD captain-turned-mayor took office last January, some other categories remain elevated, including assaults and hate crimes.
Adams blamed that on a “core group of repeat offenders.”
“There are roughly 1,700 known offenders that are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime in our city. These are New York’s most wanted,” he said. “We know who they are, and we need to get them off our streets.”
Adams said the repeat offenders must be dealt with by ensuring the city’s legal justice system has resources to adequately prosecute all cases so dangerous people are kept behind bars.
To do so, both the city and state must substantially increase funding for public defender and district attorneys’ offices, Adams said, drawing applause from the crowd, which included a host of municipal and Albany politicians, including Gov. Hochul.
Adams also said the criminal justice process is clogged by overly “complex” discovery rules and timelines for how prosecutors and defense attorneys exchange information with each other. The current rules on discovery are largely set by state law.
“This must change. Justice delayed is justice denied,” he said. “This is something we can all agree on.”
One of the city’s largest public defender groups was quick to note it does not agree with the mayor on that front.
“[W]e categorically reject any changes to the current discovery law,” the Legal Aid Society said in a statement, adding that the changes Adams seeks would overly burden its lawyers’ workloads.
The public safety proposals Adams focused on are almost entirely contingent on action from the state Legislature and the governor. He made a point to praise Hochul several times.
“It’s been a long time since the governor of New York has come to a State of the City address. It’s a testament not only to our incredible partnership but to your commitment to the people of New York City,” he said.
Adams’ speech didn’t touch on bail reform. He has clashed with Democratic state lawmakers on the issue, which is expected to come up again this legislative session as the mayor presses the case that too many defendants are released from jail pre-conviction.
A potentially ground-breaking point in Adams’ speech was his proposal to provide “free comprehensive” health care to anyone who spends more than a week in a city homeless shelter.
He said he’s working with state and federal “partners” to achieve that goal, but did not touch on how it’d be funded or how staff shortages at city hospitals and an all-time high shelter population would impact it.
Left-wing critics of Adams said his most wide-ranging policies will be all but impossible if he holds firm on the city budget cuts he floated earlier this month.
“If the mayor is truly committed to a thriving New York, he would reverse course on the planned cuts to public schools, libraries, and mental health services,” said Sharon Cromwell, deputy director of the New York Working Families Party.
In demanding budget cuts, Adams has cited the city’s migrant crisis, which could cost his administration as much as $1 billion this fiscal year.
In his address, he renewed his demand for more state and federal assistance to shelter and provide services for the tens of thousands of migrants who have arrived in the city since last spring. “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,” he said.
Adams did not address the problems at Rikers Island, where 19 inmates died last year amid conditions detainee advocates describe as squalid and dangerous.
That was in spite of the fact that several dozen protesters gathered outside the Queens Theatre before Adams’ speech to call on him to move up the city’s 2027 deadline for shuttering Rikers for good.
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who joined the protesters before attending Adams’ speech, said afterward it was potentially for the better that the mayor didn’t talk about Rikers.
“He could have easily said, ‘I don’t think we should shut it down,’ but he held back,” Reynoso told the Daily News. “So him not talking about it could be a good thing.”