Last December, Elizabeth Lewinsohn, a longtime TriBeCa resident, entered the Democratic race to represent her district in New York’s City Council, eventually raising and spending far more money than any of the other 216 people running for the Council. Of the $568,665 her campaign put toward securing the Democratic nomination in a district that covers the bottom tip of Manhattan, $522,000 came from a source with whom she was intimately acquainted: Elizabeth Lewinsohn.
The return on investment did not inspire; she effectively spent $72 per vote and lost by 20 points to the incumbent, Chris Marte.
City Council races typically generate little civic interest or remarkable dispersions of cash, one of the reasons that the race, which could be seen as a referendum on development, wound up on the radar of people who might have ignored it. Over the past 25 years, only one other campaign, to elect a Stanford-educated lawyer named Kevin Kim, spent more money on a Council bid. Running for a seat in Queens in 2009, he won the primary and then lost to a Republican in the general election.
But the scale of Ms. Lewinsohn’s self-financing seems unprecedented in a contest of this kind. She opted out of the city’s matching funds program, which would have limited her spending. The prospect of a political novice beating an incumbent seemed daunting to the point of impossible, she told me, had she kept within the constraints of public financing, which cap spending for primary campaigns to $228,000.
To put her gambit in perspective, the former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson donated just under $15,000 toward his own failed bid to become mayor. Out of four candidates in the Democratic primary for the First District, Ms. Lewinsohn ranked second, despite outspending Mr. Marte, the son of a bodega owner, by nearly $400,000 — roughly the tab she would have run up had she taken the 7,905 people who cast ballots for her to the Odeon for a plate of steak tartare and a glass of Bordeaux.
While the paperwork she filed with the city’s Campaign Finance Board identifies her as a “homemaker” (she is married to Jonathan Lewinsohn, an investment manager), Ms. Lewinsohn is, in fact, a quietly accomplished public servant, a graduate of Yale Law School, a former director of policy for the Police Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, a member of her local community board for 12 years now and a co-founder of Gotham Park, a revived public space under the Brooklyn Bridge.
There were other ways she might have made use of her time and money — running for Congress, or becoming a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum or traveling any of the byways laid out by the impressively educated husbands and wives of the very rich. But Ms. Lewinsohn found herself disillusioned by municipal leadership and was compelled to chase a political position with comparatively little prestige or power.
In doing so, she won the backing of the city’s teachers’ union. She also had the support of the First District’s former council member, Margaret Chin, the first Asian American woman elected to the Council. For many years, Ms. Lewinsohn said, it bothered her that among elite law school graduates drawn to the public sector, local government work was often dismissed in favor of those jobs seeming to guarantee more influence and opportunity for world-ruling.
“When I was at Yale, everyone was like, ‘What federal clerkship do you want?’ I was not into that,’ she told me. “You could go work as general counsel for N.Y.P.D., but it was considered much more prestigious to go to one of the federal agencies, to go to D.O.J.” Local government, she felt, was where talented people might have the most influence. “There is a room for a lot of creativity,” she said. “And generally you don’t have creative people entering local politics.”
The outcome of the race provided not just another data point in an argument about the questionable influence of money in municipal races, the most prominent one emerging from Andrew Cuomo’s loss in the mayoral primary to Zohran Mamdani despite his enormous war chest. It also revealed just how ardent opposition to development remains among New Yorkers who nonetheless cite the housing crisis as the city’s most concerning problem.
The day before the primary last week, the Adams administration sided with Mr. Marte in his longstanding fight to prevent the construction of affordable housing for low-income seniors on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden, near where he grew up.
Using it to expand the housing supply in a neighborhood where rents have gone up close to 6 percent over the past year has had the support of Mr. Mamdani and other progressive housing advocates. “So just to be clear,” Annemarie Gray, the executive director of Open New York, a grass-roots group championing more housing and lower rents, wrote after the announcement, “the official policy of the Adams administration is that elite comfort is more important than homes for vulnerable elderly people.”
Both Ms. Lewinsohn and another First District candidate, Jess Coleman, seemed to be running fruitlessly in opposition to those wary of development. Last month, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in TriBeCa, in buildings without doormen, reached more than $6,100 a month, the highest in that category in Manhattan. Rents on the Lower East Side, in the Financial District and in Battery Park City, also in the First District, all increased over the past year.
Still, Mr. Marte was the only council member in Manhattan to vote against the plan known as City of Yes, which amounts to the most extensive set of zoning changes in the city in 60 years, changes intended to create more homes accessible to those at lower income levels over the next 15 years than all of the city’s other inclusionary housing programs since they first came into place in the mid-1980s.
When I asked him about his victory in the primary, Mr. Marte attributed it in large part to “an educated electorate” that looks at the rezoning and building that is taking place in SoHo and NoHo and starts “to question other projects endorsed by the real estate industry.”
Among the initiatives the Adams administration hopes to include on the ballot this November are provisions that would shift some authority to approve or nix new development from the Council to the City Planning Commission. Another measure would speed the process by which certain new housing could be approved, once community boards have weighed in. Under these parameters, a project like the one planned for Elizabeth Street Garden would not take years and mountains of litigation to be resolved only to be erased from the whiteboard at the last minute.
And that could be an environment in which Ms. Lewinsohn’s political career could resurface. Not long after the final primary count, a representative from her campaign responded to a perfunctory question I had asked with an addendum. “Lizzie won more than 2,500 votes this election than the incumbent did when he first ran (and lost)! She has a bright future ahead of her!”
Bianca Pallaro contributed reporting.
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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