Transcript: Mayor Adams Participates in Fireside Chat at Manhattan Institute on Quality of Life Vision as Part of “End the Culture of Anything Goes” Campaign

August 14, 2025

Reihan Salam: Mayor Adams, it's no secret that you haven't always seen eye-to-eye with the state legislature in Albany. You have persuaded state lawmakers to move when it comes to involuntary commitment in a big significant victory that we saw in the state budget most recently.

However, when it comes to reforming how we approach public drug use, that might be a heavy lift. How do you see this work of persuading state lawmakers to move in your direction? What will that take?

Mayor Eric Adams: People, what you are finding is that our state houses and even our City Council, they have been hijacked by the numerical minority, far-left extremist views. They have gotten in the way. The noise has gotten in the way of real progress around these quality of life issues. And so the first thing I did when I became mayor, I went out and purchased a bunch of earplugs and put them in my ear so I could ignore their noise and I could get stuff done. That's what we need to do.

So, organizations like yours putting out commentary, op-eds, educating the public, because when you look at all of these issues that I have talked about, removing those with mental health illness, removing those with drug abuse, and even locking up dangerous migrants and asylum seekers, the public have overwhelmingly stood with me.

But those who were in office that were afraid because of the numerical minority in these state houses and council house chambers, they have gotten in the way. But we forge ahead, the result speaks for itself, and we're going to continue to educate the public because they have to make the final decision.

Salam: You won office in 2021 promising a return to public safety after a sharp spike in serious index crimes and a breakdown in public order. As you near the end of your first term, murders and shootings are near historic lows, but there still are real concerns about public order. What have you learned over the past three years, and how are you working to drive crime and disorder down across the board?

Mayor Adams: Yeah, and when you think about it, we are three and a half years later. All the experts told me it was going to take us five years to turn around our economy and turn around our city. We knew differently, and we knew the first thing we had to do was to zero in on public safety.

From my days as a police officer, starting my policing career started in 1984, understanding that public safety is a prerequisite to prosperity, and it's the economic stimulus package. And we knew if we could make our city safe, we would cycle through COVID, where we saw a historic number of our businesses close down, uncertainty, no one wanted to be on our subway system. And so we zeroed in on not only the actual crime, but the perception of crime.

How? Removing 23,000 illegal guns off our streets, 130,000 illegal cars, vehicles, mopeds, ghost cars off our streets, making sure that we put in place programs for our young people who are typically involved in criminal behavior when they are not receiving the resources they deserve. 100,000 summer youth jobs, over 110,000 summer rising, allowing children to go to school all year round, internship programs, other initiatives that we made sure that we can go after our young people.

And we know we have more to do. And that's why we put our Q-Teams, our quality of life team in place, because crime is not only what you're the victim of, but what you're feeling. And our Q-Teams are going after everything from open drug use, abandoned vehicles, littering, dumping, illegal dumping. We are going after all the things that make New Yorkers feel unsafe so we can match our success. And the stats, it must be also acknowledging how people are feeling in this city.

Salam: Many New Yorkers, including many of us in this room, are still shell-shocked by the terror attack at 345 Park Avenue not long ago. How are you and Commissioner Tisch thinking about the challenge of office security, given that so much of our urban vitality, our economic success, rests on the idea of people working together, being together in the office?

Mayor Adams: Yeah, real tragic. Four innocent New Yorkers lost their lives, one of them being a police officer, Officer Islam, as well as just promising careers we saw evaporate in front of us. And as I walked through the building and looked at the video of the actual shootings, it tore me apart. It broke my heart to see someone with such a, just a barbaric approach to harming New Yorkers. It was very painful.

And think about what happened here. We had an individual who took an automatic or semi-automatic weapon across our country with only one goal. He walked on to take the lives of innocent people. And what I want to commend is Rudin Management. I believe because of their active shooting training and the hardening of their office space, they saved lives. One of the victims was actually in one of the safe spaces, it doubled as a restroom, but it had bulletproof doors, bolts to lock your door in, and others went inside those safe spaces.

And so what we're going to continue to do is partner with our corporate security teams. We meet with about 100 of them approximately every month. Best practices, weapon detection, we're going to continue to use technology on how do we identify weapons as they enter these places of employment and continue to train and educate our corporations on why it's important, unfortunately, to carry out these active shooting drills to know what to do when it takes place because it's happening far too often in our country and we must be prepared.

Salam: Mayor Adams, you're a blue-collar New York native who is proud of your roots. There are, however, hundreds of thousands of other New Yorkers from neighborhoods in central Brooklyn, southeastern Queens, elsewhere, who have been leaving the city to move to the Sunbelt in large numbers.

How does your City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, the biggest land-use reform since 1961, address that acute housing crisis that is driving out so many other working and middle-class families from the city?

Mayor Adams: I am blue-collar, and it's obvious that you and I go to the same barbershop. We have done an amazing job. Sometimes I reflect on it and I talk to my team on what we have accomplished in housing. When you peel back all of the noise, our administration had to deal with so much noise, but when you peel it back and just say, let me just analyze pound for pound on these important issues, public safety, health care, housing, you look at the numbers.

We have created, we have put in place plans for the future. We have retained, and what we are looking at in our reshaping of our zoning, 426,000 new units of housing in the upcoming next decade. This is unbelievable. The most comprehensive housing reform in the history of the city, and when you break down individual years, we broke on housing in each year, in each individual year.

We moved more people out of homelessness into permanent housing, as we talked about, and more people that participate in the FHEPS vouchers program and the history of the program. We are putting shovels in the ground now, like our Willets Point project, 2,400 units of 100 percent affordable housing, new soccer stadium, new school, new green spaces, what we have done in the Bronx and the Fordham South project.

These places have been laid dormant for years. Flushing Airport, it was dormant since 1984. We are building thousands of units of housing there. We're looking at every agency to look at their available spaces, because government has been holding on to spaces without thinking about housing, and we have really turned the attention on how do we build towards the future.

This is the first time in our history that every community board is now going to be rezoned to build new housing for working class New Yorkers. And even in our City of Yes, we could have gotten an additional 20,000 units, but the City Council blocked and stopped us from doing an additional 20,000 units, but we forged ahead anyway.

We're doing five neighborhood rezoning plans with 50,000 new units of housing are coming out of those rezoning plans. We're getting an announcement today that it's going to be Manhattan with 10,000 units of housing. That is how we prepare for the future.

We were hemorrhaging New Yorkers, but we’re seeing a large number of New Yorkers that are returning to the city, because no matter what we think about it, many people, when I'm in rooms with mayors, other mayors across the country, we debate about whose city is number two or number three, but they look at me and smile. There's no place like New York. We will always be number one.

Salam: Mayor Adams, by some measures, the city's economy has never been stronger. Record jobs, record tax receipts, and yet there's a real sense that the achievements of this moment are fragile, that we may well face a severe economic downturn.

When you're looking at tourism, when you're looking at home health aides, things that have buoyed the city's blue-collar economy, these are not all things that are guaranteed to continue forever. When you think about the economic state of the city, what are the things that you believe we need to do to cement this fragile recovery?

Mayor Adams: We have to lead from the front. Some experts would like to believe mayors don’t have a real impact on creating jobs. They need to look at why we broke the record ten times over and over again. We have more jobs in the city’s history, 4.6 million jobs. If you look at my small businesses, one out of five started under this administration because I knew when people come to this city to open a company and they want employees, they ask two questions. How good are the schools? How safe is the community?

We brought down crime. You just looked at the numbers in our public school system. Our numbers in reading and writing are going up. We are outpacing just about the entire state, so we know those two important entities are crucial to building jobs here. We know these are going to be challenging times, but we're telling New Yorkers, don't be afraid of what the future has to offer.

The introduction of artificial intelligence is not going to take jobs away, it's going to make it easier for people to do their jobs. We know that using technology to make this a smarter city is going to give us the ability to increase the number of hirings that we're doing. And then make sure our young people are prepared for the future. It's crucial that we prepare our children for the jobs of the future.

What does that mean? It's not just being academically smart, it's being emotionally intelligent. It's knowing how to work in groups, it's knowing how to have critical thinking, how to manage your emotions, dealing with social emotional intelligence. When I speak to my employers, they shared with me, “Eric, I don't want to go outside the city to recruit our employees,” but I must do the job in the Department of Education and in my secondary education to prepare our young people to fill these jobs that the future is going to hold. And that is what our task has been, and we have been successful in doing so, despite the naysayers.

Salam: Mayor Adams, one last brief question for me. What is your message to young New Yorkers who fear that they're never going to get on the housing ladder, that they're always going to be buffeted by rising rents, and that if they want to get ahead, their only shot is to leave the five boroughs? What would be your message to that young person?

Mayor Adams: That's a great question, and we are their partners. That's why we lowered the cost of child care from $220 a month to less than $20 a month, a 90 percent decrease. We're saying to them, if you're a low-income young person and you're starting out in the city, you know what your mayor did for you? He took away all of your income tax.

Our young people and others who are low-income New Yorkers, they pay no income tax in the city. We raised the earned income tax credit. We made sure that we would pay off college tuition for foster care children and give them life coaches to 21 as young people to get the support that they deserve. Our mentorship program is important. What we'll be doing in HPD for first-time homebuyers is to make sure that people can get a foothold in owning their homes.

What I really want to tell them is don't allow your despair to have you become radicalized. That's the biggest threat we're facing as a city and as a country. Our young people are being radicalized right under our eyes. When you look at some of the polls on how they feel about the country and do they love the country, if our young people start the process of not believing what this country stands for and why we are the greatest country on the globe.

No one is lining our borders to leave America. They're lining our borders to come into America because we have the best product globally. Our young people, that's our bench. Anyone that builds a dynasty, if you want to use a sports analogy, if your bench and your farm team does not believe in the love of the team, then you cannot ever build a dynasty.

We have too many people in our farm team that's in colleges, high schools, intermediate schools, that have been radicalized not to love the team. We have to have them love the team again. No matter what they go through, they know we will always survive and get through it. We can't feed them despair. We have to feed them the care they need.

It's the greatest country on the globe. They should be proud of being part of the greatest country on the globe. Those who hate our way of life should not radicalize our children to hate our way of life.

Salam: Please join me in thanking Mayor Adams. Thank you.

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