Government
New York City’s government is not just in crisis — it often is the crisis. COVID-19 has exposed the City’s mismanagement in stark detail. And it is Black and Brown communities who suffer the most from its dysfunction.
I know because I lived it. As one of six children with a single mother who struggled to make ends meet, I have committed my life to making the City work better for those who need it the most.
Inefficiency and inequality lead to injustice. How? New York has tremendous resources — but it often wastes them on programs that do not deliver the desired result or spends them in ways that do not help the New Yorkers who need them the most. I will make our City government more efficient, effective, and equal. Here’s how.
A more efficient cityToday, the City governs from crisis to crisis — always dealing with the immediate problem and never the cause. Structural changes and smart management are necessary to create efficiency and reduce inequality.
I will do that by:Closing the budget gap without affecting public servicesInstituting real-time governingFinding the waste
A more effective cityCity agencies each keep their own records and data, with very little productive interaction — and New Yorkers who need help fall through the cracks. Using technology, we can focus on making government more effective by tailoring New Yorkers’ interaction with the City down to the person.
My plan includes:Building one digital platform for New Yorkers to access all City servicesBringing the City to the community by delivering services in storefronts and in-person in lower-income neighborhoodsCreating a Recovery Score to track our progress with analytics
A more equal cityFinally, the City must do a far better job of maximizing its resources and using its regulatory powers to help deal with structural economic and social issues. That includes prioritizing spending on programs, services, and contractors that reduce inequality. It also means revisiting regulations that discourage growth, particularly of our Black and Brown owned small businesses.
My plan includes:Prioritizing minority- and women-owned businesses for City contractsEliminating the fees for starting a small businessInstituting a warning system for violations that do not pose immediate dangerMaximizing the use of City assets — particularly office buildings for affordable housing
Economy
Our city is in serious economic trouble. The pandemic has cost us hundreds-of-thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue.
And the deep hole we find ourselves in is not entirely due to COVID-19. Our economy was built on uneven ground: pervasive inequality, with just a few sectors accounting for most jobs, and vast wealth disparities. Before the pandemic, Latino and Black households in the city averaged approximately half the income that white households did.
Eric Adams Speaking Infront of Outdoor Dinning AreaOur recovery starts with public health and public safety. But there are other things we can and must do immediately to save our economy. Some things will take years. Some things will take a generation. But we must get started now on all. Here’s how we bring back New York better than ever.
Step 1 - Protect what we have built and who built itSince the pandemic and its disastrous impact on this country’s economy, we have seen a significant downturn that is far worse than most American cities’. Estimates are that, even after the COVID crisis is somewhat under control, New York City will have half-a-million fewer jobs than before the pandemic. We have to right the ship, fast.
Step 2 - Create a stronger, deeper, fairer 21st Century economyNew York City must position itself to lead in the industries of the future: the green economy, healthcare/biotech, digital technology and cybersecurity. Our workers were unprepared for this even before the pandemic. Invest in green infrastructure projects through a municipal bond program.
Step 3 - Create an equitable economy that gives everyone the opportunity to thriveBlack and Brown communities were sidelined as the New York City economy flourished. For instance, the communities I grew up in — Brownsville and South Jamaica — continue to experience significant unemployment while massive development and economic expansion occurred in other parts of the city. Those communities have waited long enough — now we will build an inclusive economy for them that is equitable and enduring.
Education
The quality of a child’s public education in New York is unfortunately and unnecessarily often determined by what neighborhood they live in and how much money their family has. This leads to unforgivable racial disparities that limit the futures of thousands of our kids, year after year.
Now COVID-19 threatens to deepen those disparities even more, as lower-income families without adequate internet access and childcare options struggle with blended and remote learning.
But we also now have a chance to completely reimagine our education system. I believe the key to improvement is opening as many paths to success for our students as we can, and to focus much more on how they learn—not just what they learn.
To do that, I will desegregate our schools, institute a year-round school year, significantly expand school and instruction options, prioritize universal access to both online and in-person classes, feed our kids only healthy food in schools, and focus on the holistic growth of every student.
Our immediate focus should be on improving remote learning, which has been a disaster for thousands of families. This is both a failure of our City government and the internet providers who have been promising for years to improve access to lower-income New Yorkers and have not delivered. We can and must do something to correct this injustice. Internet providers need City approval to operate in New York. We should be using that leverage to force them to connect the families of schoolchildren and offer free service.
We must also offer clear paths to college and careers through our schools. For instance, I am very proud of the Brooklyn STEAM Center, a first-of-its-kind facility that offers high school students real-world work experience in emerging professions.
Poor education and lack of preparation leads to incarceration. As many as 80 percent of Rikers Island inmates do not have a diploma or GED and a third of college-aged inmates read below a fifth-grade level. The vast majority of those New Yorkers are Black and Brown.
We can fix this and close the racial performance gaps by greatly improving the educational options for parents and students so that each child gets a quality education that is right for them.
In the coming weeks, I will lay out my full vision for reimagining our public education system. I look forward to sharing it with you so that we can begin to build brighter futures for our children.
Health
OVID-19 tore through New York City when it first hit the United States, leaving unimaginable death and suffering in its wake. And the fight is far from over.
Although we have made great strides in understanding, treating, and tracking the virus, our planning is flawed and inconsistent — and it is costing us lives. At the same time, COVID-19 hit us as hard as it did because our public health system was — and still is — woefully inadequate, especially for communities of color.
Like a patient with a weak immune system, the underlying condition that has allowed COVID-19 to kill so many Black and Brown New Yorkers is inequality. We cannot hope to control the coronavirus without also curing that disease.
People of color in our city have far-higher rates of chronic illness and the comorbidities that make people vulnerable to COVID-19 and other viruses. Black New Yorkers’ life expectancy is a full four years lower than the citywide average. That is the result of poor healthcare, lack of healthy food options, and unhealthy living conditions.
I was one of those people of color living with a chronic illness that could have been prevented. I was diagnosed with diabetes and lost sight in my eye. My doctor told me I was facing blindness and amputations. So, I switched to eating only healthy foods and began practicing mindfulness. Within weeks, I was feeling better. Within months, I had sent my diabetes into remission.
Now I want to do the same for all New Yorkers who just need access to quality healthcare and food to improve their health and protect themselves against illness and this deadly virus. I am certain we can. What it will take is an unprecedented commitment to public health from City government.
Turning around this city starts with taming COVID. We need an all-in effort that restores public confidence as it protects public health, undoes the deep racial health disparities in our city, and reduces inequalities by increasing delivery of services.
I have already released a number of proposals that should be implemented immediately, including: instituting a color-coded vaccination program to ensure we reach herd immunity and vaccinate the most vulnerable New Yorkers as quickly as possible;; sending community health workers directly into neighborhoods with high morbidity rates; expanding access to telehealth; building out a robust rapid-testing program, and setting up COVID care centers in NYCHA complexes and in vacant storefronts in lower-income communities.
In the coming weeks, I will lay out a detailed plan for how to improve our public health system, the health of New Yorkers, and our success against the coronavirus.
Safety
Today our city faces an unprecedented crisis that threatens to undo the progress we have made against crime. The shootings and deaths are startling. And communities of color are the hardest hit.
People do not feel safe in their homes or on the street. We cannot go back to a New York that is unsafe for New Yorkers—especially our children. We won’t go back.
As a former police officer who patrolled the streets in a bulletproof vest in the 1990s, I sadly know what I am talking about. Lawlessness spread through our city like a disease then, infecting communities with the same terrible swiftness that coronavirus threatens today.
At the same time we face a crisis of confidence in our police. And we cannot have lower crime without greater trust.
I personally understand the distrust and anger with the NYPD. As a young man, my brother and I were beaten by police at a precinct house, and we carry the psychological scars of that to this day.
That is why I called out racism in the department as an officer and formed 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement to push through reforms. And why I continued to call for change throughout my career, including the successful effort to stop the unlawful use of Stop-and-Frisk.
But the debate around policing has been reduced to a false choice: You are either with police, or you are against them. No. That cannot be true. Because we are all for safety. We need the NYPD — we just need them to be better.
We also need a plan of action. When I was a police officer, I was part of the team that developed what is now COMPStat. That system of tracking crime and analyzing data allowed us to take crime from historic highs to historic lows.
There is a way forward. With all stakeholders at the table and a laser-like focus on addressing the reasons behind our spike in shootings, we can put this fire out before it consumes entire neighborhoods and torches our reputation as the safest big city in America.
With a commitment to justice that is felt in the heart of officers, new technologies, clear objectives, better organization, good old fashioned police work and better relations with the communities they serve, we can have both safe and fair.
In the coming weeks, I will share with you my detailed plan for tackling crime, reforming policing, and bringing justice to our criminal justice system.
Housing
New York City is always changing — but every once in awhile, there is a sea change. At these pivotal moments, New York’s strength has always been its resiliency and its ability to adapt. After 9/11, we remade downtown Manhattan into a live/work community that prioritized livability and did not depend completely on the 9-to-5 workweek. After Sandy, we rethought our shoreline.
Now we face perhaps our greatest test: COVID-19. The effect of the virus on the way our city works — or doesn’t — is apparent. For instance, suddenly places like Midtown that generated so much economic activity for New York seem built for another era. But we can also see much more clearly now how the design of our city was already flawed — and often how those flaws perpetuated inequality.
New York may be a group of communities, but it is also one city, and we should all be in this recovery together. Let’s start acting like it. To see ourselves as walled-off enclaves is an old, and frankly biased, way of thinking. Housing — including affordable housing — can be and should be put anywhere it can go, as long as it benefits those who need it. And the infrastructure and space for jobs that support the city must also go where it is smartest to build — not just easiest.
An aggressive affordable housing planTo deal with our housing crisis in New York, I believe the city must rapidly build new affordable housing while protecting existing apartments anywhere and everywhere we can. That means bold, aggressive measures that are even more necessary now as we simultaneously fight a pandemic and an economic crisis.
More options for New Yorkers to live and workMuch of our city is zoned for another era, when all New Yorkers lived in one area and worked in another. When COVID-19 hit, it economically decimated neighborhoods dominated by tall office towers, where retailers, restaurants, and other businesses relied almost entirely on 9-to-5 workers. The city also relies too heavily on office workers and the service economy overall, when it could and should be expanding employment options in areas like life sciences, urban agriculture, and manufacturing.
The investments NYCHA tenants deserveEven before the pandemic, we knew that tens-of-billions of dollars was needed to make basic improvements to NYCHA homes and complexes throughout the city. Now the virus has exposed even more issues that need immediate attention. I believe we need an all-in approach to raise enough funds and make the most use of them in order to save NYCHA tenants from dilapidated buildings and deteriorating apartments.[59]
