Speaker Adams Wrong to Attack Mayor Adams on Housing

12 minutes read

Yo, Adrienne. You really need some fresh material.

City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is twisting herself into knots to attack Mayor Eric Adams on housing policy, which is one of the things he has actually done well.

In the latest example, she blasted him for using his first land-use veto for the Bally’s casino plan, “not housing.”

But when could the mayor have helped housing with a veto?

I can’t think of a single anti-housing Council action that reached Adams’ desk to sign or veto.

I asked the Council press office if it had any examples. Crickets.

The reason is pretty simple. When the Council blocks a residential development, the application is always withdrawn before it gets to a full Council vote. As a result, it never gets to the mayor.

For example, when the Council crushed Nadine Oelsner’s $115 million project to build mixed-income housing, a day care center and manufacturing space on an empty lot in Crown Heights, it did so without voting. So there was nothing for Mayor Adams to veto.

When the Council watered down the mayor’s City of Yes plan, reducing the projected number of new homes to 82,000 from more than 100,000, vetoing it was not really an option, because that would have killed the entire plan.

Last I checked, 82,000 homes are a lot better than none.

The second part of the speaker’s statement said, “The mayor can’t claim to have the most pro-housing administration in city history when he and Randy Mastro single-handedly killed Elizabeth Street Garden affordable housing for seniors that was approved by the Council six years ago.”

Single-handedly? The speaker seems to have forgotten the role that one of her own members, Chris Marte, played in killing that Nolita senior housing project.

Marte opposed the project and killed it by using his leverage over other, much larger housing developments that Mastro and the mayor wanted to build in his district. Marte agreed to support them on the condition that the Elizabeth Street project be abandoned.

Speaker Adams perhaps could have prevented this by promising to get those three projects approved by her chamber over Marte’s objections. But she is an apologist for member deference, the Council tradition that gave Marte the power to cut his deal with Mastro.

The speaker has stood against member deference before: She backed a blood center project in Midtown East that the local member, Ben Kallos, opposed. But that was not a housing project.

Bruce Teitelbaum’s One45 in Harlem, however, was a housing project, with more than 900 units, half of them affordable. But the local Council member, Kristin Richardson Jordan, stopped it in 2021. Where was the speaker then?

Again, Adams could not veto Jordan’s decision because Teitelbaum withdrew the application before the Council could vote. Had the speaker come to him and said, “Don’t withdraw your plan, I’ll get it through,” more than 2,000 New Yorkers would soon be enjoying new Harlem homes.

Maybe the speaker could not have rounded up 26 votes to overcome Jordan, her radical Harlem colleague, but Adams could have patched together 18 votes to support a mayoral veto. But scenarios like that don’t happen by accident. They require foresight, cunning and guts.

On that project, Speaker Adams was bailed out because Jordan wasn’t re-elected and her successor approved Teitelbaum’s revised application. She might be bailed out on Oelsner’s, too, because a subsequent rezoning of Crown Heights allows Oelsner to build what she had planned (with even less affordability, if she wants).

If the speaker is going to call out the mayor and his top aide for abandoning the Elizabeth Street project, she should call out Council member Marte, too. Or at least acknowledge the role that the Council’s member deference played in that fiasco.

Bad blood between the speaker and mayor is fueling this petty bickering. That happens in politics. But petty bickering doesn’t produce housing.

In her bid for mayor, Adrienne Adams got 4 percent of the votes in the Democratic primary. In his bid for re-election in November, Eric Adams is polling at 7 percent. Their political careers are waning and their time in office is coming to an end. They should use their remaining months to do something constructive.