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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, we have a special episode of the podcast today which needs very little introduction, but we are speaking to the mayor.
I love our transition to local city reporters.
It's really fun learning about our city. Mayor Adams, New York City, Mayor Adams, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Thank you, thank you.
I think this is my second time this week, or was it last week? Today's go to fast, but it's way here being at Bloomberg.
Thank you so much. I read an article recently from the journalist Derek Thompson. Here's talking about the death of partying in America. People apparently don't party as much as they used to. New York City people still party, but you know, there aren't as many twenty four hour clubs as there used to be. Apparently there's fewer four am liquor licenses, et cetera. You're a man who appreciates night life and partying. What happened? Why don't people party as much as.
That's a great question, and first of all is why do I appreciate the night life. It's thirty billion dollar industry, and we viewed the city often as mayors, we viewed it as nine to five, but it's not. When I was a police officer, I work overnights, midnights, and when I go into a night life a restaurant, I walk in the kitchen and I talked to the dishwalpsher, I talked to the busboy or girl. Of those are everyday
working class people. And I knew when I came back after COVID, I had to turn our night life around, and.
We did that. You can't get reservations in the city anymore.
Broadway had the best twelve months in the history of the city. And part of coming back out at night is what is our signature New York the city.
That there's no party crisis.
No, it still still shuts down earlier than it used to know it does.
And part of the problem, I believe you have far too many people on community boys that have been for a long time, and they're not connecting the economics with the desire really not to have any night life.
Nightlife is important of the community.
It is allowed to let off some steam networking, really collaborating. Listen, you come to New York, You're going to find your mate here because the diversity of this great city.
I wanted to ask about some other specific policy proposals, specifically housing, and you know, I went to your website and I saw the sort of summary of your proposals, and then I clicked in to learn more and it took me to your previous accomplishments under your first term. So I'm really curious if you could maybe broaden out some of your housing policies, Like what exactly are you talking about here?
Well, first of let's look at the fact that when you look at shovels in ground and what we're proposing in our rezoning, including the most comprehensive housing reform in the history of the city sixty years previously, was the first time we really started looking at housing and some
of the reform. We're going to build more housing in one term than the twelve years under Bloombirds the eight years under Deblasio combined in one term and twenty five billion dollars we put it into our ten year capital plan. In addition to that, for the first time in history, we are including Nightscha of housing into the plan. So we're looking at a couple of different locations. Number One, we saw the federal Estate government walk away from Nightscha.
Nightscha has an eighty eight billion dollar dollar capital problem. We had to find new ways of building on Nightsye. We did the land trust. Many people tried, We got it done. We're also doing the rat programs. Many people have attempted to do it. We got it done. The amazing project that we are getting ready to do in rees House is where we're going to tear down all buildings, build new buildings and without zero deplacement of tennants. That's how we deal with tonight you issue. Then we realized
that we want to build more housing. We have to build everywhere. It was unbelievable how many elected officials were stopping that building fifty nine community boards. Ten of those fifty nine were building more affordable housing than forty nine combined. So our goal now is to build all over the city. And that's what City of Yes was about, a little more housing in every community that we could allow residents and tendants to stay in the community instead of leaving
the city. So our goal in the future, as we move forward forward, want to build faster, We want to build more. Drive by Willis point right now, twenty four hundred units of affordable housing. That's THEIRS new soccer stadium that's paid private dollars, a new school, new open space, and you see the buildings actually going up in the same term. So our focus is building more and building everywhere.
The first time I ever heard about controversy at the Elizabeth Street Garden was in twenty eighteen, I think. And then now it's twenty twenty five and you've come out and you said, okay, let's move on. Let's not continue to fight this. But setting aside whether it was it's right to use that space for housing or not, like setting aside these pictures, why does it take seven years or longer to come to answers on these questions?
Great question, And if you if you do an analysis over all the things that we've done, we've land plan we landed planes that no one else was able to do. When you read all the noise, take all the noise out of the administration, and you say, okay, let's look at the raw numbers. Like you said, your listeners are sophisticated. You look at the raw numbers. We were able to land the plane on Governor's Island. We were able to land the plane in sunset sunset Paarl, were able to
land the plane on these difficult tasks. So what did we do When we brought in Randy Master as the first deputy mayor, he was he looked at it. He says, how can we leverage this space? How could we walk away with a win?
We did.
Elizabeth Street Garden was going to do about one hundred and twenty five units of housing. One hundred and twenty units. We're going to get six hundred and twenty five units of housing.
And we got.
Elsewheared after years of fighting about it.
Yes, this is New York. Let's let's be clear about the city. Whatever you try to do, we got eight point five million people. We have thirty five million opinions. You know you're always going to have New Yorkers no matter what you attempt to do. But how do we leverage the best for the city. So we took the concerns of Elizabeth Street Garden. People were concerned about that.
They wanted to hold onto the garden, and I said, you got to give me a plan that I could deal with the number one crisis I have in the city, and that is housing, and we were able to leverage that space and walk away with over six hundred additional units of affordable housing.
That said win. No matter how you talk about it.
What's the broad lesson from that experience, Because when we were came about nightlife just then, you know it sounds like community groups and special interest groups are still an impediment or an obstacle to some of the things that you seem to want to do. Is there anything you're thinking about to maybe like encourage more cooperation, build up that city of yes.
Idea, yes.
And you know what we witness in the city, particularly in our elected officials. Elected officials on Monday they say housing is right, but on Tuesday they say not in my district.
We don't want to hear it.
And if I walked away with anything in the last three years and seven months, is that you have to ignore the noise. You have to do what's best long term for the city. And it's a retrospective appreciation and if you do an analysis not only in housing, Look how far I was away from where the noise of the leadership of Democratic Party when I was talking about
taking severe mental health illness off our streets. I got an unbelievable pushback when I talk about investing in the police depart and when others were talking defund the police. Everyone was pushing back. And now we see record levels of decrease in crime. When I was talking about the cannabis fight, that we had to do something about it. So when you look at where I was, even in housing, everyone was pushing back on city of Yes, and today all came to where we were. And when you live
these experiences, you have a different eyesight than others. And so what I want for my local community groups and organizations is to understand we're in the city together. And far too often folks said that listen, I have my backyard, I have my park, I have all that I want. I don't want any additional people here. But if you do that, then you're going to hurt the long term plan of this city.
So your main opponent in this race has made affordability the sort of cornerstone, and you talked about obviously the expansion of affordable housing in New York City under your administration, which is real. Nonetheless, New York City is a crazy expensive place to live. Yes, I think it's worth it because I think it's the best city in the world. So it's like, you know what, I'll pay the high cost of housing here because I love New York City.
But do we just have to accept you know, it's sort of in the same way you said, Okay, you know New York's always gotta have thirty five million opinions for eight point five million residents, that's New York City. Do we just all have to accept that the city has to be incredibly expensive?
No, no, we don't. And what government must do is utilize their powers to help working class people. And when you think about it, that's what we have done. We put thirty billion dollars back into working class people, and we looked at what is driving the course. Number one, as we talked, affordable housing was one area, and we're doing that.
We're building.
We break breaking records year one, year two, and year three. We build more affordable housing individual years in any other administration in history.
But look at the other areas.
What's the number one cause of bankruptcy medical day were excuse in medical debt for low income New Yorkers forced to care children? Sixty seven hundred age out every year they slip through the cracks. They don't get to support that they deserve. We're paying their college tuition and we're giving them life cultures into their twenty one instead of aging out at eighteen, so they don't slip through the cracks. Or what hurts women the most but families, in particular childcare.
We dropped the cost of childcare from two and twenty dollars a week to a month to less than twenty dollars a month. We were the first one in twenty years to drop to earn it. To increase the earned income tax credit, we're paying for high speed broadband in low income housing and Nisia and other locale locals in the process reduce the cost of using our subway system
for low income New Yorkers. So the real message is I can't handle the price of bread, but I could put bread back in the pockets of New Yorkers and we've done it after sum of thirty billion dollars. So it's easy to talk about pine the sky ideas that is not within the span of the control of the mayor,
like free busses. Free busses is a three billion dollar price tag, and if you're stating that the foundation of your plan is based on increasing taxes on the high one percent earnest when in fact you don't have the authority to do that. You know who has the authority, Assemblyment. My opponent is an assemblyment. If he couldn't get it done as the assemblyman, how is he going to get it done as a mayor, particularly when the governor who signs off on it sayd that she's not raising income taxes.
New York City is the highest income tax in the country, The state is the highest in the country. And so what I did put money back in the pockets. Do you know there's no income tax for low income New Yorkers in the city because of my ax attack. That is how you look at the power of the mayor's office and say, how do I help working class people. I'm blown away that he has hijacked the narrative of being a broking class mayor and putting money back in
affordability issue when I've done it. That's my record is clear on putting money back in the pockets of working class people.
Since we're talking about your opponent's policies, zorn Mum, Donnie, you've said that New Yorkers don't understand what socialism is. Can you give us your definition of socialism? Like, what is socialism to you?
Well, first, I would say this, seventy percent of New York is like the theme and concept of socialism. And many people, if you were to ask, they will tell you they've never been to a socialist country. I've been to a communist and socialist country. I've been to Venezuela. I've been to Cuba. I know what rational books are. I think it is the concept that you're going to take money from one area of the population and equal it out across the board. And many government run locales
and facilities such as supermarkets. Now, when you do that in concept, it sounds good, but if you open when the government runs supermarket, you want to kill the bodego industry.
You're going to kill the independent of supermarket industries. So I think the whole concept of believing as though resources from the top end that those who believe that we should not have any billionaires in the city, which I just don't, it doesn't balance out because when you look at where the tax dollars come from and spreading the wealth.
If you want to use that classification across the entire population.
That doesn't work for me, has never worked anywhere on the globe. There's not one country we can point to that says this concept has been successful.
I mean, we do have progressive taxes, though you just said that lower income New Yorkers don't have to pay New York tax So there is an element of that here. Like, is there a point at which is too much? Or like, what exactly is the issue when you say it's too much? Explain it to me more, like, is there a point at which the redistributive.
Effects flips into socialism?
Yeah, flips into socialism.
Well, I think so. I think there's a balance. And I like to say all the time, I want the person who drives the limousine to get a fair wage and be able to provide for his family. And I want the person assists in the backseat of the limousine to be able to use his discretionary dollars or her discretionary dollars. When you look at the billionaires in this city that everyone wants to demonize, they're the ones who
pay into their philanthropic actions into our museums. They're the ones that sponsor like the Robinhood Foundation to deal with where people are slipping through the cracks. They're the ones and their tax dollars are paying for our teachers and our firefighters and those who are on the low economic end. That perfect financial ecosystem is what makes a city like
this great. So if your position is that, particularly in the atmosphere where you now could run your organizations and entities outside the city, you can easily go to Connecticut, New Jersey, of Miami, which we lost a great deal of high income earners. If your position is we don't want you here in our city, ideally that's attractive to people to hear we're getting rid of all the billionaires, But when you drill down in the numbers, those billionaires
are keeping the lights on. And because we have billionaires, we're able to do things like as attacks for the working class.
Going back to something you said earlier, you're talking about federal funding, federal support for Nitscha, the public housing. Should any mayor of New York City currently, should the mayor have a oppositional relationship with Trump. A lot of people want that. A lot of people want the mayor to stand as a bulwark to some extent against Trump's policy. You obviously benefited from the fact that he dropped Charger or his DOJ dropped charges against you. There's been cooperation
in terms of ice on wrikers. How do you think about the fact that whether you know, they're sort of sort of yeah, detrumpifying New York City for both the citizens and also undocumented residents.
The most dangerous thing that being a married mayor during this time is people read headlines and not the fulls, you know, and that's unfortunate when you think about it.
Sometimes you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.
And when you look at the definition of the relationship I have with the current president, everyone is ignoring the relationship I have with President Biden.
I called myself the Biden of Brooklyn Eye.
I watched that video clip. I watched it like ten times.
Yeah, because we had a good relationship and I like the president. Do I believe there were those in this administration that participated in law fair He actually said it, He said his Justice Department was politicized when he partnered his son, he knew what was happening there. But Biden came to the city and spent the whole day with me.
When I was dealing with law and enforce Smith issues and we didn't have an ATF had someone to be in charge of the alcohol, tobacco and firearms, and he appointed someone.
He visited my crisis management teams.
He sat down and spoke with me about going after violence, which was my the issue that I ran on, and so the same goes to for this president. I didn't know Donald Trump. A lot of people don't realize that. I didn't know until I met him at the Alfred E. Smith dinner and he spoke with me. He was on the campaign trail prior to even meeting me, saying it's wrong what they doing to this mayor in New York City,
and he saw what was happening. And when he came into office, the same things I was saying about dangerous migrants and asylum seekers pre election, I was saying post election. And when I walked out of the voting booth on election day and the microphone was in my face and they said who did you vote for? I said VP Harris. I was very clear, you know, did I disagree with
what I saw the Democratic Party was doing? Yes, but I still remained loyal to do was what I thought was right to do so when you fast forward to today, we took the ministration to court more than any other mayor in the country, nor the mayors going to court as much as I have pushing back on the policies.
But when we needed the President of the United States to look at a project we had in Sunset Park or Windfall, billions of dollars investment of five hundred thousand homes were going to use the energy, fifteen hundred union jobs. I flew to Washington and sat down with the President and said, mister President, we can't have this project destroyed. He lifted the stop work order. That project is now moving forward. That's what mayors of big cities are supposed
to do. Knock and pout in the corner and just call the president names and say, well, you know what, people are upset of the outcome of election.
But how does that help New York. How does it.
Help New York to communicate and coordinate to go after dangerous people. We had dangerous Venezuelan gangs in the city. They were forcing women who are migrants and undocumented into prostitution. I coordinated with federal authorities. We took down to twenty seven gang members we were able for gun possession and
other dangerous crimes. So it is my job as the mayor of the biggest city in America to sit down and not war with the president, but work with the president to deliver for the people of this city.
This is the perfect segue for me to ask something that might seem slightly random, but actually I think it's relevant because you've recommended before that New Yorkers should read Cash Ptel's book All about the Deep State. What do you think about the Trump administration's refusal to release the Epstein files.
I would love to see what's in those Epstein filess. You know, I think we all do.
You know.
I'm eager to look at UFOs. You know, there's so many history. I'm still trying to figure out who kid to kill Kennedy.
You know, well that was another chase.
There's what's going on here because a lot of people are really confused because for years this was a yeah, and then suddenly it's like it's a hoax.
What do you do?
You have a you have a you have a guest for what's going on at all.
I don't know if his advisor is security personnel advise otherwise of timing. I don't have no idea. I look forward to seeing. There's so many deep secrets in America that I think we all want to know, and it's imperative that as much as we can find it as possible. And I'm going to talk about cash Cashier's book, which I thought was a good book. People laugh at the terminology of a deep state, Uh, but it is. We have people in government who have been in government through presidents,
through mayors, through governors, and they're very arrogant. They believe they are the elected. They believe they answer to no one. They believe that they are able to hold up projects that they don't like. And I saw that firsthand as the mayor. And they're connected to reporters, they're connected to prosecutors, and they're connected to be able to they write a letter on you in a minute, they get a story planted in a minute and leaks. And I saw it
in how it operates. Now think about this fore moment. Everybody let it go over their head. The Southern District of New York classified themselves as sovereign.
I mean, we need to really think about that.
As soveign, there's no sovereign entities in America, everyone responds to someone. If you believe you have to report to no one, even main justice, you could do whatever you want. That's unacceptable and I should outrage every American that any entity with that level of prosecutorial power that can really disrupt your life. You know, peopot in me, mya diamond, I was indicted for calling the fire Department asking them to do a building inspection, not to pass what I
ran on. I ran on making the FDNY I respond to businesses that could not open, and they connected it to well, you had a bunch of upgrades when you paid for your tribho and we're going to now turn that into bribery and we're gonna.
Put you in jail for thirty three years.
Come on, I want to go back to ice for a second. I take your point absolutely about violent criminals and the need to address them, whether they're migrants or not. But obviously, you know there's ice raids happening across the country, including nonviolent but undocumented migrants. New York City has a
long history of being a self designated sanctuary city. Setting aside the sort of violent criminal element, what is the degree to which you know this is going to continue, presumably going forward at least to the rest of the Trump administration. What is the degree to which you're inclined to cooperate with the administration on nonviolent undocumented migrants.
We don't clear.
And as you mentioned, of the city's a sanctuary city, and understand, Centuary City is not a law. It is a belief that we believe in this city. If you're in New York and you buy a bottle of water and you pay taxes on that, those taxes go to your goods and services.
So in this city, if.
You are documented or not, we don't question you on that. You can go get medical assistances if you need it, Your child will be able to go to school, You can call a police. If you're a victim of a crime, you could make sure that you could walk through the streets or the city of New York. And that is what our entire belief system is. We will never cooperate or collaborate with ICE on civil enforcement. That is against
the law. We never done and we never will. We will coordinate with them when it comes down to criminal enforcement. Because we need to be very clear on this, and I think this has been distorted. ICE is not a criminal organization. People could dislike. I don't like taking money out of my pockets, but it's still a federal agency and it's needed to make sure our tax dollars are collected.
Is spent.
ICE is not a criminal organization. ICE is a federal law enforcement agency. Our city has determined that parts of their duties we are not allowed to collaborate with.
We respect that and we never will.
But I'm going to collaborate with law enforcement agencies HSIFBI, ICE when it comes down to keeping this city safe. These gangs were extremely dangerous, and you had others who were committing real crimes in this city. And I don't care if you're documented or undocumented. After twenty two years of being in the law enforcement community, I'm going to keep New Yorker safe.
But isn't ICE's definition of a crime that includes basically anyone who entered the country illegally?
Right?
That's the problem. They're not distinguishing between gang members, filing criminals, and people. But you know, are just trying to work.
Great question, because it is a crime to enter and remain. That's a crime.
We don't collaborate on that, Okay, because it's clear in our law that of certain even crimes of that nature, we will not collaborate in. And so when it comes down to that level of crimes, we would not collaborate. We're very clear on what we will collaborate. But I also want to point this out because it's often ignored. I'm off, someone is always pointing up Mike in my face and saying, hey, every what do you What are you going to do about what ICE is doing. That's
a federal agency. I think we're getting were allowing our federal electors off the hook. I don't control the rules of the federal agencies. I don't have I have the city council. That's my job to look at laws, to sign their laws. You know, we're not asking our federal partners enough. Hey, guys, what are you doing about this? That's not my job. The enforcement of immigration is a federal authority, not a city authority. I'm going to do my job. I don't control who come across the border.
I control who's in the city when they are across the border. And I told President Biden this, I said, listen, we have a porous border. I went down to El Paso, I went down to the Darien Gap to Ecuador, Columbia, Mexico, and I saw the flow, and I saw how they were telling people. The streets are paved with gold in New York. Why don't we control the flow. We have serious population issues across our country. We should be allowing people to come into the country and say, hey, Kentucky
need backstretch workers in the racing industry. Here's where you're going for three years, and then you could go wherever you want in the country. This is a win win if we handled it better. We had no control at the border. We were allowing anyone to come through. Now that we see a substantial decrease, we're no longer and get long again. Four thousand people a week into to this city, which was just not sustainable.
Speaking of crime, the crime stats have improved a lot in the last couple of years. The rat I've been monitoring your war on rats. Impressed.
He's a single issue voter.
I've been very impressed with the war on rats, and I've looked at the stats on three to one one calls for rats, et cetera. On the other hand, the city is still dirty. When I take my kids to the park, only half the time. Can I expect to be able to not even half like find a clean bathroom elevators at the subway is still like, you know,
it's this is a world class city. Do we just have again sort of going back to the thing, like is this inevitable that a city like New York City has to have it so that we don't even have clean bathrooms most of the time, Like speaking like from a family issue like public childcare obviously incredibly important, but there's all these other things that make it much more difficult,
I would think than it needs to be that. I feel like everyone has just come to accept, like, you know, we can't have clean bathrooms in a public park.
I agree with you one hundred percent.
I would never accept a city where there's disorder, there's carry outs in this dirt. I just don't won't remember when I came into office. Many people don't realize that we had encampments in our subw so.
It was the worst of the COVID pandemic.
But yeah, all.
Over we had on a long highways. January and February, I went out and there's still pictures that someone sent me. The other day, I went out and visited people that were living in encampments. And I saw that when I walked in and crawled in their encampments and their boxes and the tents, I saw stealth food, human waste, drug path frenaria. Many of them was dealing with schizophrenic behavior, bipolar. And I went back to the team and said, we
can't do the city, can't live this way. Go look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portly, but look at these other cities. You don't see that here. Because I had a zero tolerance. And once we dealt with the encampments, once we dealt with the crimes, we moving twenty two thousand legal guns off our streets, one hundred thousand ghost vehicles, illegal veh because that were running our streets. Once we dealt with that, Now we move into the next layer.
LEYA.
We immediately went after the road that's in our city, which was just really an indicator of just total uncleanliness in the city.
Now we put in place a twelve.
Hundred person a quality of Life team, our Q team we call it. That's going after those nagging issues. I still run right around the streets one am, two am in the morning, calling my commissioners when I see an encampment or I see an overflowed trash. They all tell you about those horrific calls that they give from me, because we should see it before you see it. You should deserve a clean bathroom. You deserve to be able to go to a park where there's no trash on it.
You deserve to not have to worry about a road and running across your feet. You know, this is what you deserve. These are the basic things that we deserve. But we had to deal with the level one issue, first dealing with getting us out of COVID, dealing with crime, and then this unexpected crisis of dealing with the min using a silum seekers.
You know, people tell us all the.
Time that, okay, Eric, you have to migrant in silum secrets behind you.
Everything is okay. It's not.
We spend seven pointy seven billion dollars. Five hundred million of that should have gone to chronically absent children. A billion should have gone to building housing for our seniors. A billion should have gone to making sure that we boost up our Department of Sanitation. What I'm trying to share, the long term repercussions of what we experience is going to have long term impacts on our city.
On the quality of life issues and crime. I got to say, practically every time I'm in Broadway and Lafayette the station, which is pretty often, there are people shooting up in the corner. I literally went down the stairway the other day and a guy was standing there shooting himself up in the arm and I was three inches away from him. That was uncomfortable. That happens all the time, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. What exactly is the obstacle to improving some of the issues.
Is it budget? Is it enforcement?
What is it?
You know? And I hate it.
I hate it when I see someone what we call not in on the street exactly when I see someone. We were up at the Hub the other day. It was just a state of total disrepair until we got in there and zoomed in. We put in place what we call our path team and our scout teams, and I spent a lot of time in the subway system, and the goal is how do you talk people off the system. Now, we were able to take eighty five hundred people off our system that was living on our system.
But I cannot tell you how much a challenge. It is dealing with people who dealing with severe mental health issues. They don't know they need care. That is why I was trying to get off. We need to pass the Involuntarily remove a bill because they are people who are harmful to themselves and harmful to others, and we have to take them inside. We have to bring them inside. And many people just have a philosophical disagreement with me
on this issue. I want to say that if you are using drug use, we need to take you inside. If you are thirty degree, whether you don't have on shoes, you have soil your clothing, you're yelling and screaming. We have to talk them off the latch now and hope that they have to building trust and the Scout team are doing an amazing job, but it takes longer and you see those repeated offenders over and over again. But our goal is to go after this illegal to shoot
up drugs in public. But when you do a real crackdown, you get a lot of heat that we're criminalizing drugs because drugs, you know, addiction is a disease. So we're trying to use the right balance. But we are far more encountering people than others would like us to do.
We get a lot of complaints because we encounter people who are injecting themselves with drugs, people who are dealing with severe mental health illnesses, and I got to really ignore that noise for the better public overaw public safety of the city.
Hotel prices in New York City are insane, and part of it seems to be this sort of opposition to hotel expansion, both from the owners of existing hotels and from unions. Also, you can't do airbnb, but whatever, I
care less about that. When you think about like the vitality of New York City, like, do you have any vision like how to break this impass or do we just have to accept that as much as the city is going to grow, that the number of the capacity for our ability to take in tourism is just going to be sort of capped by our inability to build any new hotels.
We need to build more, and we're at the pre pandemic levels. Our hotel industry is doing well, I think, you know to May. In fact, we have sixty five million tourists that came in last year. This is still the hot spot.
How was New York City is the summer, shipping the summer from tourism perspective, now, it's not.
The levels we have.
I think some of the conversation around tariff, some of the conversations impacted our tourism, particularly some of our domestic tourists. We used to get a lot of tourists from Canada and we never really recovered the way we should have. Our our Asian market, Chinese were they were a major part of our tourism.
But we're gonna We're gonna bounce back. We had it.
We had to hit during COVID and we were able to recover after COVID and this is still a good product. You know, people want to yes, and we we believe the tourists. The hotel industry is going to continue to growth. You know, some bumps in the roads. We're looking at a conversation around what we could do with our hotel tax.
Yeah, how do we get more rooms?
Though that's the goal. We got to build more. We have to encourage more building. There were certain laws that were put in place previously about getting and receiving uh the permits to build. We had to do a real analysis of how do we encourage to get more rooms in the city.
I have one more question. Yes, this is my most important one, possibly and something I've always wondered, a great mystery of our times. But in the course of prepping for this interview, Joe and I watched a lot of your previous interviews, your previous videos. I was watching your famous contraband video. Where in the world did you get a used crack pipe to use as a prop in that video?
That was and actually I'm gonna remake that video.
Oh a lot in times when I did that first video for those not a where it was a video.
Showing how you should look in your child's room for drugs.
When I did the first video, and still today people say, oh, you know, how can you do that as hard on children? You know, many people don't know that if someone is selling drugs in your home, when the police come, they come in and do a raid. Everyone goes grandmother, grandfather, children go to acs. Families are disrupted, and we need to take control.
Of our homes. Now. It may not be in your home, you know, in.
Your home this is something that you don't have to even worry about, or possibly I don't have to worry about it. With Jordan, my child but when you go to many of the inner cities where violent is rampant and.
Drugs are pervasive.
When we did that video, the number of responses people gave me was like, wow, I didn't know that and.
So that that broke crack pipe pike.
Back then when I did it, it was just about everywhere, like you see in certain communities, you see needles.
Did you just pick one up off the street or something off the street.
Oh my gosh.
Okay, last question, A bunch of people through gave Andrew Croma tons of money and it came up totally short in the primary. You're still running, yes, A would you consider in September dropping out if you're fourth in the polls or third in the polls? And be why should anyone donate to your campaign or your super packed given how ineffective those dollars seemed to be in the Democratic primary?
It was it in effective in the last file and we were raised one point five.
No, the money given to Cuoma was totally ineffective because he got trounced. Yeah, so why should anyone feel that any political giving is going to be useful in this environment.
And money is important. It's unfortunate.
I am probably the only elected officials that are stated over and over again, we need to take money out of politics completely. We should give a dollar amount to every candidate. They could only spend that dollar amount and that's it. There's no reason we should be calling up individuals asking for money. But that's the nature of the beast. And so when you look at it, those money, those dollars are used for important reasons, because television is extremely expensive,
your staff, it's costs money, et cetera. He didn't lose because of this shortage of dollars. He lost because he did not want to be mayor of New York City. Is not a consolation prize. You know, you step down as governor and then you wake up one day and say, okay, I want to do a consolation prize and run.
To be the mayor of the City of New York. And it was obvious.
You don't come out on weekends, you don't do this, don't sit down and speak on podcasts or interviews. You live in a bubble. He always lived in a bubble. Governor's son went on to become a g went on to become governor. And then there's another pattern that a lot of people are ignoring what he feels about black men who are elected. Nobody wants to talk about this. He did it to Carl McCall. When Carl McCall ran to be the first black governor, Andrew Cuomo got in
the race of sabotage his campaign. He did it to Charlie King. Charlie King was running to be attorney general, raised five million dollars, was one of the leading candidates. He got in, pushed Charlie King out. He did it to David Patterson. David was gonna run for re election. He decided to sabotage his campaign and moved him out. Now he's trying to do the same thing for me. And like you said, your audience needs to really understand what happened. I ran for independent. Everyone knew I was
running for independent. Everybody thought I was foolish for doing so, not understanding that the only mayors that have won on the independent line we sit at mayors.
We knew that Mundanni.
Was going to be on the general election ballot on the Rooks family line. Why did and you throw his name into it if he was in the primary. He did it because he thought he could follow the same process that he's done for a long time. So let's look at the polls. The posts had him up for forty points, forty points. He sent out a poll through his staffers the day before the election that he was
up ten points. He lost by thirteen points. How could we trust when you have an unexpected voting environment right now? This voting, this vote is going to depend on new voters, and everyone is talking about the energy on the Madonnie camp. Nine percent of the voters, two point five million Democrats having voted yet a million independents having voted Jets, several
hundred thousand Republics having voted Jet. Never in my history of politics have I seen the energy around the stop Madonnie movement coming from my bodega's owners, coming from my small property owners, coming from my Jewish community, coming for my former former Soviet and Socialist block constituents that are here right now say they don't want to go backwards.
So I said it before.
If you look at some of the old tapes, I said, this is going to be the most exciting male race in the history of the city. I knew it in seven eight months ago.
Politics.
That's right, Where were you actually the night of the Democratic primary, and what was your reaction when mom Donnie won. Were you like, oh, I expected this because of all the reasons you just laid out about quota.
I'm trying to think about it.
I think I was in the best sleeping I knew what the outcome was going to be. I said six months before the primary that Madonnie was going to win, and all I had to do is wake up to at an early day I had things to do in the city, or I think we had a storm that day. I could have been going around the city looking at some of the rain sites. You know, you think about
I always use sports as an analogy. You know, I have the crown, and just the thought that Andrew is gonna tell the second sitting mayor, second mayor of color, that I should step aside for him.
I mean, that's the highest level of arrogance. You know.
During my difficult moments COVID, my LUSS asylum seeker love Fair, I just stepped down and stepped up. I said, I was elected to serve the city. No matter what I had to face, I was gonna live up to my commitment. He didn't do that. When it got hot, he left. He abandoned his obligation for the City of New York. I would never do that to the city. I didn't abandon it as a police officer. I'm not going to abandon it as the mayor.
You and are Producer care were the only two who knew six months earlier that I'm down he was gonna win. Eric Adam, thank you so much for coming on odd lots. Really appreciate your chance to chat.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Can Joe call you if he sees a rat?
Yeah? Well no, thank you so much.
I enjoying it, Tracy.
I'm glad we finally got a chance to speak to the mayor. I've never talked to uh, never talked to him before.
Uh No, neither have I. I'm enjoying this transition. I do think it's a really interesting New York is obviously a really interesting p tree dish in which to experiment with a lot of economic policies, and it sort of solidifies a lot of the trends we've been talking about over the years, including affordable housing, taxation and things like that.
I liked your question about when is there some magic line from which progressive taxation becomes socialism?
Right?
And I actually think like this is a question for a lot of people, including Mom, Donnie, etc. Is there like what actually like constitutes like an acceptable or an ideal level of redistribution because obviously, you know Mayor Adams was talking about you know, yeah, socialism has failed everywhere, as he asserted, and yet an important element of New York City is the money that is raised from wealthy New Yorkers do as you put it, you know, put a put money back into people's pockets to make the
city more affordable.
Right, So at the moment that's optional. Billionaires can choose to do it. But I mean, if you think it's a good thing, then why not make it you know, I mean potentially maybe mandatory at some higher level.
Yeah, right, And why does it have to just be billionaires, because also there are a lot of people who are not billionaires who are also very wealthy, and that everyone just talks about billionaires, which I think is an important element of this conversation. You know, I do think that like there is a certain degree to which some of the pathologies of the city or just take it as like it's New York City and deal with it. And this is like what you do. So it's like and
this is like, these are the costs. So of course it is going to take years to figure out whether we're going to use a specific plot of land that is contested and turn it into housing. Of course it's going to do is going to be a certain level
of public drug consumption and rats. Although the rats have declined and broken bathrooms and stuff like that, it does feel like in the discourse we just sort of accept that because it's New York City, that there are certain things that are just going to be like SuPAR or actively hostile. Again, like from a family perspective, like, it really is not good at all that it's so hard frequently to find a bathroom in a public area.
I will just say here, I mean, other major cities in the world do it differently, right, Like you go to a place like Tokyo, you do not see people nodding off in the street. And it kind of blows my mind also that New York still has this extremely high tax rate and a lot of these quality of life issues.
But anyway, there's plenty more to talk about. If you wins reelection, we'll have them back on. Well, definitely, we'll definitely have them back on to talk about how all of these things are going?
All right?
Shall we leave it there?
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the Authoughts podcast. I'm Tracy al no Way. You can follow me at Chasey Allaway.
And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart, follow mayor Eric Adams, He's at NYC Mayor follow our producers Kerman rodriguezet Carman Arman, Dashil Bennett at Dashbot and kill Brooks at Kilbrooks. More odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots with the daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chat about all of these topics twenty four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash od Lots.
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