We live in an age that favors strongmen and showmen. Brad Lander’s problem is that he’s neither. Sandwiched between Andrew Cuomo’s dark energy and Zohran Mamdani’s bright charisma, Lander has struggled to attract attention — at least, he did before ICE agents arrested him on Tuesday.
But Lander deserves our attention. A list of his achievements runs long: He was instrumental in passing New York City’s paid sick leave and Fair Workweek laws. He led the effort to set the first minimum wage in the country for delivery drivers. He helped integrate the schools in District 15. He used New York City’s pension funds to rescue 35,000 rent-stabilized apartments after Signature Bank collapsed. He pushed for the Capital Projects dashboard that tracks how much New York’s infrastructure investments are costing and how long they are taking. When Times Opinion asked 15 experts to pick the next mayor, Lander was far and away the favorite.
On Sunday, I spent a rainy afternoon walking with Lander through one of his accomplishments. The Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn is best known for its canal, which is best known for being filthy. Speckled on both sides by factories and refineries, the canal was described, as far back as 1910, as “almost solid” with sewage. In 2009, New York magazine called Gowanus “the only underdeveloped section of brownstone Brooklyn, for good reason: The canal is disgusting.” In 2010, the E.P.A. named it a Superfund site, and the cleanup of the canal began.
It was clear that once the noxious fumes wafting off the water eased a bit, Gowanus was going to flourish. It sits between the ritzier neighborhoods of Park Slope and Cobble Hill and was already a hub for artists and young professionals and public housing. Much of the neighborhood was zoned for industrial use, but that was going to change, and how it changed was going to matter.
Lander was the City Council member for the district that included Gowanus. And he helped rally the community around a plan for the new development, which mandated that at least 25 percent of all new units would be affordable, designated big investments for the neighborhood’s existing public housing, created new infrastructure for capturing the storm water that kept flooding the canal with sewage, ensured public access to the waterfront and even set aside space for artists.
I’ve watched many efforts to spread the wealth of new development collapse into delay and infighting. This one didn’t. Walk through Gowanus today and you see high-rises sprouting everywhere you look; ultimately, Gowanus is expected to deliver about 8,500 new units of housing. Lander told me that this was more than any other part of New York City.
It’s rare to see so much development all at once — the last time I saw anything like it, I was in China. It’s even rarer to see so much development lauded by the left. And yet, here is The Nation: “What appears at first glance as a cataclysm is, on closer inspection, a possible model for how New York City neighborhoods should manage the business of growth and the addition of much-needed housing.”
It’s not clear that you can replicate Gowanus. There are few Superfund sites on what are otherwise incredibly valuable tracts of land. But when you can build that much, that fast, it unleashes a lot of prosperity that you can spread around. Lander has some ideas that might unlock huge amounts of growth all at once — like building high-rises atop some of New York City’s publicly owned golf courses — but most of the 500,000 units he wants to build will be more of a slog. Still, Lander sees the principles behind the Gowanus upzoning as a model for the city and the method behind its success as an argument for his candidacy.
“In order to make New York City work for its people, we need a lot of growth,” Lander told me. “But that growth, left to its own devices, is very unequal. If we let the housing grow and we let the jobs grow and we don’t do anything to make sure we confront how unequal it is, it’ll just be more and more unequal.”
I’m a Californian, not a New Yorker. The scale of this place shocks me. The mayoralty sits atop more than 40 agencies and 300,000 employees. You have to be at least a little bit nuts to think you can manage this city. But Lander, as comptroller, knows how those agencies function and which do and don’t work. He has a full plan for civil service reform, for instance, that begins with a description of the Kafka-esque process the city currently uses:
A non-city employee with appropriate qualifications must first wait for an exam period (which sometimes do not exist at all) to be advertised, qualify to take the exam, wait several weeks for their examination date, and then again wait for a ranked list of test takers to be certified, which includes a time for a mandatory appeals process. Once the list is certified, only then can agencies begin assembling applicant pools, and they must start at the top of the list and call at least one in every three candidates, in order. The median time for releasing scores from an exam is 290 days. Including time for test development and hiring, city agencies must often wait well over a year to onboard qualified employees.
As best I can tell, neither Cuomo nor Mamdani have addressed the issue directly — but who the city hires, and how it manages those people, is a powerful lever. It’s telling that Lander has put so much thought into how to use it.
You could spend days reading Lander’s array of plans and proposals — they’re at a depth you tend to see only in presidential campaigns. But he has the problem that earnest liberal politicians often have: He has dozens of policies stretching across hundreds of pages but lacks the two or three policies that define who he is. He is offering plans rather than communicating through policy.
“Build the wall” was a statement of who Donald Trump was, not just what he would do. “Freeze the rent” and “fare-free buses” and “city-owned grocery stores” are more than just policies — they are tight memetic packages for the idea of who Mamdani is and what he believes. To quote my old editor Mark Schmitt, it’s not what you say about the policies, it’s what the policies say about you.
I was open, at the beginning of the campaign, to the possibility of Andrew Cuomo’s redemption. What is shocking is how little he has done to seek it. What he learned from the bullying and sexual harassment allegations that led to his downfall appears to have been … nothing. How has he grown? What has he learned about how to treat those who work with or for him?
Cuomo’s claim to be the best suited to manage New York City’s government is undermined by how many people in or around that government loathe him. Andy Byford, the former head of the M.T.A. whom Trump recently picked to lead the redevelopment of Penn Station, said Cuomo made his job “intolerable.” Gov. Kathy Hochul called Cuomo’s conduct as governor “repulsive and unlawful.” Bill de Blasio, the former mayor, called him “a bully” who is “obsessed with revenge.”
Cuomo’s whole pitch is that he’s got the experience and the relationships to get things done. For that to be true, he’d need to repair many of those relationships and reach out to the voters and officials whom he so deeply alienated during his governorship. But there’s little evidence of that in the campaign he’s run. (It’s notable that Lander cross-endorsed with Mamdani, a relative newcomer to New York City politics, rather than Cuomo.) And Cuomo’s bid to make the campaign a referendum on Mamdani’s views on Israel is thoroughly cynical.
Electing Mamdani, Cuomo’s main foil, would be a high-risk bet that mastery of communication and attention will translate into mastery of the sprawling, complex system that is the New York City government. It’s not a crazy bet. Communication matters. The tendency of both politicians and pundits to treat it as a superficial performance, rather than a source of leverage and power, is a mistake.
And there are moments when Mamdani makes arguments I’ve been waiting a long time to hear the left make. “Oftentimes, the very things we should care about on the left, we have allowed the right to make their own concerns,” he said on Pod Save America:
Bureaucracy, efficiency, waste — if you care about public goods, public service, these have to be your primary focuses. Because any evidence of that inefficiency is then a justification for the elimination of the public sector. And I think similarly if you think about the language of quality of life, it’s often been understood as if it’s a conservative concern. But in fact that’s a concern at the bedrock of every working person’s life.
The question is: Can Mamdani deliver the government he promises? What if he can’t get the tax increases from Albany he’d need to fund his plans? How would he manage his relationship with the police force that he sought to defund? What if an extended rent freeze slows down new construction of, and holds back repairs on, rent-stabilized units? What if a recession hits and Trump slices into New York’s budget and Mamdani needs to manage austerity rather than investment?
There is nothing unusual about electing a democratic socialist as mayor of a big city. Europeans do it all the time. And I’ve found Mamdani to be a smart and subtle thinker — able to absorb new information quickly and balance ideas against each other and change positions when needed. But I would feel more confident if I saw him surrounded by a team of people who bring experience from outside politics and whom he trusted to challenge his intuitions.
Lander exists between Mamdani and Cuomo: He has far more experience and far better relationships inside New York City government than Cuomo does. And he has a far deeper record at pushing progressive change through the machinery of the city than Mamdani does.
As I was finishing this piece, Lander was arrested by ICE. I found myself watching the video again and again. Lander is at an immigration courthouse in Lower Manhattan where ICE agents have been arresting migrants when they show up for court. Lander is holding on to a migrant ICE is trying to arrest, and he demands, again and again, that they produce a warrant. He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t attack any of the law enforcement officers on the scene — one of whom has a black ski mask pulled down over his face. But he doesn’t let go of the man he’s trying to protect, either. As the ICE agents turn to arrest him, Lander calmly and repeatedly insists that their actions are illegal. “You don’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens asking for a judicial warrant,” he says.
It’s a moment that combines much of what makes Lander’s candidacy compelling: He understood the system well enough to know where to be and when. His tactics were insistent while avoiding unnecessary confrontation. The action united an unusual coalition around him — both Cuomo and Mamdani demanded his release, with Mamdani rallying outside the courthouse for Lander and Governor Hochul showing up to lend her support.
Watching it, I was gripped by two thoughts. First, we are very far down a very dark path when ICE agents are arresting elected officials. (The Department of Homeland Security says Lander was “arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer,” a lie so brazen, given that this is all on tape for everyone to see, that it makes the whole episode even more chilling.) And second, Lander sure looked like the kind of guy you’d want in charge at a time like this.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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