Eric Adams Has a Message for the Democratic Party

In July, Eric Adams narrowly won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York, making him the odds-on favorite to win in November. And he won the nomination by running directly against the verities of today’s progressives: asserting that the police are the answer, not the problem; that “defund the police” misjudged what communities of color actually want; that Democrats had lost touch with the multiracial working-class voters they claim to represent. Adams won on that message. He won in deep-blue New York City. It’s made him a national figure, and he’s been emphatic on what that means. “I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he said. And “if the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential election.” When politicians become national stories, they often release, or rerelease, a book. Adams is no exception. But instead of a campaign manifesto or an autobiography, “Healthy at Last” is a book about the health benefits of plant-based eating. “Outspoken vegan” isn’t a political identity I tend to associate with ambitious politicians at odds with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, but that’s Adams for you. He doesn’t shy away from a fight. In this conversation, Adams and I talk about the fights he is picking, or will have to pick, in the coming years: with progressives who he thinks have lost their way, with police unions he wants to reform, with wealthy communities where he wants to build more housing, with critics who think plant-based eating is a hobby for foodie elites and with voters who may not be willing to wait for Adams’s “upstream” approach to social problems to pay off. Book Recommendations: Healthy At Last by Eric Adams Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza You Are The Placebo by Joe Dispenza Upstream by Dan Heath Atomic Habits by James Clear You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:20Ezra Klein?

  In July, Eric Adams triumphed over a crowded field to win the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City. He's heavily, heavily favored now to win the general election, too. And that might sound like a New York-only story to you, but Adams' campaign became this strange bellwether. At a moment when the left seemed ascendant in the Democratic Party, when "defund the police" was still a buzzing slogan, and Biden's victory was considered the last gasp of Obama-ism, the kind of thing only Obama's vice president could pull off, Adams' campaign read and was framed by him as a challenge to the progressive politics of the moment. Here was a black former cop who said police were the answer, not just a problem.

• 1:05Ezra Klein?

  He warned that the Democrats had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races who feared disorder in their cities. And then he won. He won with a working-class, multiracial coalition, the kind of coalition the other Democrats promised they'd be the ones to put together. When politicians have a really fast rise in stature, when they go from local to national story, they often publish or republish a book. And Adams is no different here. But the book that's coming out now in paperback is. It's not a biography. It's not a policy document. It is not a manifesto. "Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses" is what it sounds like.

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  It is a book about plant-based eating for health. After a frightening diagnosis of diabetes, complete with vision loss, Adams turned vegan, and he credits it with reversing his disease. Since then, he's been on a campaign to get others to go plant-based, too, particularly in the black community, where he argues beloved food traditions reflect centuries of racism and exclusion, that they remain a way America's racist past inflicts its punishments upon the present. Now, I'm plant-based, I'm a vegan, but I don't tend to think of veganism as a very safe or popular political identity, particularly not for an ambitious,

• 2:29Ezra Klein?

  more culturally moderate politician. But Adams has turned it into a metaphor for his campaign for his approach to governing. He says he wants a plant-based plan for the whole city. So in this conversation, we talk about that plan. We talk about Adams' veganism and some of the different cultural manifestations of veganism. We talk about what police need to do to win back public trust and Adams' history, his very unusual history on this issue, whether the Democratic Party misunderstands its own voters, how to solve New York's housing crisis and upzone wealthier areas, and much more. As always, my email, eshrakline [email protected].

• 3:19Ezra Klein?

  Eric Adams, welcome to the show.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra. It's a real pleasure to be on. You're like a rock star. I was excited about the thought that I was gonna be on your show.

• 3:29Ezra Klein?

  I don't know about that. It's a pretty nerdy world in which I'm a rock star. Let's start in your book. I'm a vegan. I don't tend to think of veganism as a political winner. It gets coded as something elitist, something judgmental of other people, something weird. And you're an ambitious guy. In your book, which came out a couple of years ago, you say you have a plan to become mayor of New York, which seems to me like it's going pretty well. So amidst all that, what made you publish a book arguing for a plant-based diet?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  You know, my mom told me when I was a child and I was arrested, she told me, "Baby, you're gonna find yourself in dark places. You determine if that dark place is a burial or a planting." And every dark place I was in, particularly with the diagnosis of diabetes, I saw it as a planting, and this is the fruits of the harvest and saving the lives of others are the harvests that I hope I have throughout my life.

• 4:25Ezra Klein?

  Tell me the story of getting diagnosed with diabetes because the way you found out about it was was pretty traumatic.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yes, it was. You know, men ignore symptoms all the time. I think we're hardwired just to suck it up. You know, after being an athlete as a child, you know, you play with pain. All of those little statements that coaches would say, you know, and I internalized that. And I was feeling some discomfort and my hands and feet tingling all the time. Later I learned it was nerve damage. I had a pain in my stomach when I was out of the country. I thought it was colon cancer because I just lost a good friend to colon cancer. And I made a commitment to myself. Once I landed back in New York, I would go see the doctor. And when I got there that morning, I woke up, I couldn't see the alarm clock. My vision

• 5:14Speaker 01

  in my left eye was gone just about, and my right eye was really dimming also. I made my way to the doctor. He checked my colon and my stomach. And when I came out of sedation, he told me that I had an ulcer. That was the pain I was feeling. He said, Eric, what's your real problem is your diabetes is out of control and you're going to lose your sight and you're going to lose some fingers and toes. That's the tingling that you're feeling. My blood pressure was high. My cholesterol was high. I looked fine. You know, I put on a few pounds, but little did I know, I was taking external selfies. I need to take an internal selfie and my body was falling apart.

• 5:53Ezra Klein?

  And so what happens then? How do you find plant-based eating to be an answer to this?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Well, I went to five of the best doctors. You know, I was the bar president at the time. So I was able to call my hospitals and say, listen, this is what's happening with me. And they allowed me to see their experts. And I I visited five of their best doctors. And they all told me the same thing, that you will be on medicine the rest of your life. You're going to take insulin and two other medicines, medicines for your vision loss to try to slow it down, your diabetes, so many, you know, different prescriptions. They gave me a pamphlet that stated, living with diabetes. I went to the computer and I typed one word difference. I didn't say living with diabetes, I said reversing diabetes. And it took me down a different journey.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  I met some amazing doctors, one in particular is Dr. Esselton. And I called him up, he was at the Cleveland Clinic. I told him what I was dealing with and he said, fly down to see me. I did just that. And he basically stated, it's your food. And I laugh when I think about it. When he was telling me what I needed to stop eating, I said, what kind of quack pot is this? I'm losing my sight and he's telling me to stop eating chicken. But I was just so afraid at the moment that I decided to go home and give it a chance. And when I looked at my cupboards and noticed that the food he described, the over-processed, heavy oil, heavy sugar. I said, let me try this.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  And sure enough, when I tried it, three weeks after going whole food, plant-based, my vision returned. Three months later, my nerve damage went away, the ulcer went away. My diabetes went in remission. I dropped a substantial amount of weight and my body just became healthy.

• 7:47Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about the decision to make this a political cause. Look, I'm a vegan. I also want to be careful what we promise or don't promise in terms of what that can do for, for health. I know real healthy vegans and less healthy ones, Oreos turn out to be vegan. You can do all kinds of damage to your body on, as a vegan. But it is a tricky, personal thing to begin making that part of your public persona. And for somebody who's running for higher office, for somebody who's got a reputation as, you know, an ex-cop, a working-class guy, a salt-of-the-earth politician. I'm curious about that decision you made to make this your entrance into publishing, but, but also inextricable from, from who you are on the public stage.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  And you're right, because being identified as plant-based slash vegan can really turn off a great deal of people. I believe it has received a negative connotation and it's sort of this elitism. I would sit down at meals with friends and they'll say, oh, you too, you think you're too good. Oh, you, you know, now you're white, that you can eat the food. You grew up on this food all the time. What's wrong with you? But when you have credible messengers that are able to convey the message correctly, not talking down with people, but really exposing yourself to the fears that you receive of having these awful diagnoses.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  And the people knew me already from my role as an activist to fight against police misconduct and police abuse. So when I started talking about the abuse of our bodies, it was an easy message to receive.

• 9:26Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on something you said a minute ago where a friend said, oh, now you're white, you're, you're, you're a vegan. I've noticed this too, in this conversation, that there is an association, this is a elite white liberal thing. And then if you look at polls and surveys, and a bunch of them have been done, black Americans are two to three times more likely to be vegans or vegetarians than the general population. So I'm curious why you think that is number one, and then why do you think it's missed number two?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Well, many blacks who are vegan, they're vegan for health reasons. They believe in putting the right food in their bodies and they are reluctant to be attached to some who have been extremely aggressive in the animal rights movement. And I'm a believer in animal rights movement, but we have to be clear when you sit down and you have that natural desire to be part of a group. As human beings, we're herd animals. And, you know, you still want to be accepted in your group, in your church, in your fraternity, your sororities. And so you're careful about doing things to be considered an outsider.

• 10:34Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that really struck me reading your book is you really engage in a revisionist reading of your own food traditions. One of the very hard things about changing how you eat is often it means leaving foods that your mom makes, leaving foods that you eat with your family when you all get together. But you make an argument throughout the book that a lot of what has come to be the traditional diet for Black Americans reflects a long time of violence and being kept out of the food that was being taken from them. Can you talk a bit about that?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  The food we call soul food is slave food. We were forced to eat it. We were forced to put sugar, oil, fat backs, pig knuckles, pig is. Our ancestors were extremely creative. They should be commended because working the fields and getting the scraps from the slave owner's table and then finding a way to make it palatable, it just shows the creativity of the human spirit. But we're no longer on the slave, on the plantation physically, but we're still there mentally because each time that recipe is handed down, we are handed down the tradition of slavery.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Soul food is find the most healthy food you can get and make it as toxic as possible. Collard greens are good for you. Kale is good for you. Yams are good for you, but they no longer are good for you when you start pouring the sugar, the oil, the butter, all of those items that make it unhealthy. And so what I wanted to do for people, two things I felt was imperative during the era of Black empowerment. I wanted to show people the connectivity between slavery and what we eat. And in the back of the book, I wanted them to see how good, healthy food actually is through my recipes.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  We have to start being honest and see how we are taking and destroying our lives based on the food we're eating. We sit down on Thanksgiving and pray for Auntie that's in the hospital and that she could be healed from the chronic disease. And then we say amen and we dig into the food that caused the chronic disease in the first place. That is what I want us to reckon with and be honest about.

• 12:55Ezra Klein?

  One of the things about the book is it is broadly aimed at individuals. This is how you eat, this is how you could eat differently, why you should. Here are some recipes you could make or your family can make. If you're a politician, you might be the next mayor of New York. And our current food system makes eating this way really difficult, particularly if you're lower income. Fresh fruits and vegetables, they're hard to come by in a lot of places. Plant-based meat alternatives are expensive. If I like Beyond Sausage, but at Safeway, it's 10 bucks for four of them. So what are the important public policy levers for making this kind of diet not just possible, but but easy?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  We must start subsidizing healthy food. A quote that I say all the time, we spend a lifetime pulling people out of the river. No one goes upstream and prevent them from falling in in the first place. So when we continue to allow healthy food to be too expensive, we're just going to pay 10 times that amount downstream when we cause someone to have their legs amputated or heart disease or diabetes. So the goal is to change our food policies. Number one, we have to go to the source.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Our educational institutions must start teaching healthy nutritional education diets, how to cook healthy food in home economic courses, how to use hydroponics, vertical farms to grow food in our schools and rooftop gardens. We have to think differently about food. And then we need to look at where we feed people as a city. I can't tell you what to put on your grill in your backyard, but darn it, I can tell you what I'm going to feed you in a hospital, in my correctional facilities, when a child in ACS, child protected custody. Where we feed people, we should only feed them healthy food. And that is not what we're doing.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  We're doing just the opposite. If a person is homeless, if a person is on some form of food pantry allotment, they go to the government because they don't have any other choices. So it's almost a betrayal when you know someone has no other choice but to eat what you give them and you're giving them food that feeds their chronic diseases. That's unacceptable.

• 15:20Ezra Klein?

  I've heard you use your personal story here with plant-based food as a metaphor for how you want to approach governing New York City broadly. You talk about it as a plant-based diet for the city. Tell me about that metaphor. What do you mean by that?

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Well, if I lean into the statement of how we spent a lifetime pulling people out of the river instead of going upstream, that's what the plant-based diet did for me. I could have continued the path of allowing my doctors to treat my symptoms and not the underlying reason I had diabetes. And that is what we do in this city. And really, in this country, we treat symptoms. We don't treat underlying reasons. Three weeks ago, I walked through our prison, our jail, Rikers Island. And when you walked through and I spoke to some of the young people there and some of the inmates, I was amazed to find out how many are dyslexic, how many have learning

• 16:19Speaker 01

  disabilities. We would have avoided the criminality of their actions if we would have screening of those who are dyslexic or learning disabilities upstream, or we would have given them a plant-based approach to education, and that is preventing the chronic disease of incarceration instead of allowing the malnourishment of the lack of education. And you do the same thing with foster care children. They age out every year at 21, they're more likely to participate in crime. But if we take a plant-based approach and go upstream and let them age out at 26 with

• 17:01Speaker 01

  life coaches, 90% according to one study, will graduate from high school, and we can turn this around. So you go agency by agency and you watch how this malnourished approach running our city is destroying our cities and destroying cities across America. But if we stop treating symptoms and treat underlying causes, we can turn around our city and be a healthier city in the process.

• 17:27Ezra Klein?

  You have one of the wildest backstories I've seen in a candidate in a minute, to be honest, while I was doing research for this. And you have a tendency to have pretty intense experiences and then get very focused on root causes. One of the big parts of the campaign for you has been your experience as a cop. But before we get into the public safety side of this, tell me about how you became a cop. Tell me about your first interactions with the police system.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  I was arrested as a child. I was 15 at the time. My brother and I were together. And the police officers that arrested us assaulted us. They kicked us over and over in our grind. And it just really created a very negative feeling towards police overall, but my brother specifically. And it wasn't until a young man named Clifford Glover was shot and killed. A young man, 10 years old, running from the police. The police shot and killed him. And then later, a businessman named Arthur Miller was killed by a chokehold. This is before Mr. Floyd's death.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  And civil rights leaders, one in particular Reverend Herbert Daughtry, approached me. And he approached 12 other young men. And he told us that it was time for us to go inside the police department and fight from within. I was the youth leader of the organization National Black United Front at the time. And I was reluctant, but I had so much trust and respect for him and the other leaders that I decided to go in. And we started an organization in the police department that fought for safety and justice. We really felt that they go together. Because during the time when I was beat by police, people often see that encounter of the abusive police behavior.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  But I also lost a good friend to gun violence during that time. Heroin was around. There was a lot of drugs. And it had a major impact on me and shaped my thoughts that we have to have the justice we deserve and the safety we need. And that is how I started my police career. And for 22 years, I fought on behalf of both of those entities.

• 19:46Ezra Klein?

  Let's take it as a premise here, that cities need safety, that they need good police forces. But you're somebody, you've seen the kind of thing that makes people not trust police. I mean, you're a 15-year-old kid. You got pulled into the station and kicked in the testicles repeatedly. That's a wild thing to have happened to a person. During the campaign, you were known for being critical of the "defund the police" movement. But what do you think the police need to do to rebuild trust in communities that have lost it?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yes, and you know, the reason I was able to be critical of that movement during the two years of the intense campaigning is because I spent 22 years fighting to improve police departments. And so I built up a level of credibility that I was going to do the right thing for the people of the city. And so what we must do in America and New York, we have to change the ecosystem of public safety and redefine what public safety looks like. Right now, it looks like only a gun, a badge, and a nightstick. We have to change that. We've moved to a new place. America has never came to grips with what the term

• 20:58Speaker 01

  "public safety" should mean. That ecosystem should include proactive steps as well as youth groups, community organizations, houses of worship, civic organizations. And we need to look at how we incentivize police behaviors. Think about it for a moment. You are promoted in the police department one or two ways. One, you get promoted if you take a promotional exam for the most part in New York. And the second way is based on how many arrests you make. No one promotes those who do things to prevent crime or build relationships in our community. If I'm fortunate enough to be mayor,

• 21:42Speaker 01

  I am going to look at, how do I promote the officer that stopped someone from committing a crime, changed the atmosphere in their community, participated in this holistic changing of our ecosystem? That's the person I want to promote. The officer that not only responded to crimes and made arrests, but the officer that turned around lives and ensured that people are on the right pathway and built a symbiotic relationship between the people that he's sworn to serve and protect. And then, we must get rid of those bad apples in an expeditious fashion. I'm not going to allow abusive police officers to stay in my police department. We're going to uplift the nobility of public protection

• 22:26Speaker 01

  and ensure that the finest are going to protect the finest in our city.

• 22:31Ezra Klein?

  Often, the biggest and most important source of opposition to changes like the ones you're talking about here are police unions, who have a lot of power in places like New York particularly. So what do you do with police unions and what do you do with police union opposition?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  You establish the dialogue. You share with them how important it is for them to think differently, upstream, plant-based thinking. What does that look like? Why do you wait until an officer carries out an action that would jeopardize the safety and livelihood of their partner? Police unions, historically, they have never come out against a police officer that knowingly did something wrong. For example, during the Black Lives Matter protests, there was an officer who maced a young man, pulled down his mask, and maced him in his face. That's a clear violation of procedures. That was an opportunity for

• 23:31Speaker 01

  the police unions to step up and say, he is not one of us. Police must police themselves. And I'm going to encourage the heads of our unions on why it's important to do so and tell them, let's hit reset. Let's establish a new relationship. The good guys in this city cannot squabble with each other. While the bad guys watch us squabble with each other, it is better for us to move forward as a unified police department to ensure that all New Yorkers are safe, including the men and women who wear the uniform. That's the type of conversation I'm going to have. And many of the unions know me. I wore the uniform. I know what it is to put on that bulletproof vest and protect the children

• 24:13Speaker 01

  and families of the city. So I start out in a different relationship than any other mayor that I know this important agency because I was a part of this agency.

• 24:23Ezra Klein?

  But there's a part of me that is skeptical that some of these unions are open to this dialogue. I mean, so in 2019, Ed Mullins, the head of the Sargent's Benevolent Association, which is the second-largest police union in New York, he sent around this video that said, "The projects will always be dens of crime and violence. Cops will continue to wade into that fray." Blacks will continue to attack and ambush us forever. And he sent this super racist video to thousands of sergeants with the message, "This is the best video I've ever seen telling the public the absolute truth." So what happens when the very mindset you're trying to get rid of is embodied in the very figures and institutions that you need to get on board with those changes? I mean, I don't think the problem is that Ed Mullins has never heard people think he's wrong about this. He's just decided the truth is something different.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  So true, and truth is relative based on who is living through their life experience and how they determine what's truth. I believe in his mind that was truth. You're seeing as we redefine public safety in this country, what are you watching? You're watching a high level of retirements. Men and women who can't fit into this new mode of policing are going to find themselves going the way of the dinosaurs. And you will adjust or you will be removed from law enforcement in this city and in this country. And so my goal is to lean more into everyday New Yorkers to be members of the police department. We have two levels of law enforcement in our city.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  I like to say the major leagues of NYPD. And then we have a lot of the minor leagues, law enforcement entities, hospital police, homeless service police, school safety officers. I'm going to promote them into the police department after serving two years. And why is that important? Over 70 to 80% are black, brown and women. And this is going to diversify the department with the Ed Mullins and others who believe rhetoric like that are not going to be able to remain in these agencies.

• 26:26Ezra Klein?

  The New York City Council passed legislation earlier this year that limits qualified immunity for police officers. It makes it easier to sue them for things like using excessive force. Do you support that legislation?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  I support qualified immunity when an officer steps out of his authority.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  We have to be extremely careful to just have a blanket approval of qualified immunity. What does that, what does that look like? An officer is responding to something like a bank robbery or shooting. He discharges his weapon and the bullet hits an innocent person who was not part of the crime. That officer should not be sued. He should be indemnified by the city and the city should be sure that they take care of that officer during his trial. But if you look at the Floyd-type incident, or when someone steps outside this span of authority and they abuse that authority, that officer should be open to being sued privately.

• 27:27Ezra Klein?

  When you talk about violence and crime, one thing that, that you do push on is that there is a lack of concern among liberals for black homicide and crime victims, even as there's a lot of attention to victims of, of police violence. Can you talk a bit about how you see that?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  I tell people that if black lives matter, then it cannot be selective matters. I've knocked on doors and told mothers and dads that their children were not coming home. There was no consolation if that child, that innocent person was killed by someone wearing a blue police uniform or blue jeans as a gang banger. And so those who only talk about the Floyd case, and at the same time when Floyd is killed, you have 70 people shot in Chicago. On 4th of July weekend here in New York, you had close to 80 people who were shot.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  That is not consistent in your message and we must be consistent. We can't do things just as popular or just a soundbite. And so, yes, let's focus on dealing with the issues of police misconduct and we don't have to mix the two. So if someone comes to me and talks to me about police misconduct, I'm not going to say to them, well, what about the shooting that happened in Brownsville? That is not right to do. You can have a separate conversation, but we need to put the emphasis on saving the lives of innocent people. No innocent person should be the victim of violence, no matter where it comes from. And just as we focus on reforming police practices,

• 29:09Speaker 01

  we should also have that level of focus on reducing our communities of violence every day.

• 29:15Ezra Klein?

  One of the places I think these two agendas come together is in homicide clearance rates. In New York City in 2020, the percentage of murders that were cleared was just about 50%. So half of all murders went unsolved. What do you do about that? How do you, how do you improve that clearance rate?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Well, you will find that one of the real inhibitors to clearing homicides is the lack of participation of people who see the incident and don't want to cooperate with the police department. We need to create a new energy in the communities where these homicides are taking place. Participation to find a guilty person is crucial. Anytime you have a belief that snitches get stitches and don't be a person that snitch, that creates the atmosphere that people find creating a safe haven for those who are committing

• 30:18Speaker 01

  crime is acceptable, and it's not. And so it's imperative that when you build that trust that you were talking about earlier, when police officers and communities know each other, not only because they sat next to each other in the church pews, but their children go to the same schools and they're part of the same PTA, they're part of the same Little League coaching team. When they know each other, you will find that many of these cases would be closed by arrests, but we have to build that trust. And that is what I'm fighting for, and that is what I know I could accomplish as the mayor of the City of New York if I'm elected.

• 30:58Ezra Klein?

  I want to shift gears here a bit to something else that ends up being a driver of crime, but also just a driver of a lot of despair, a lot of problems in the city. So the median home price in New York City is now around 720,000. I found this number remarkable. That's up from around 385,000 in early 2010. In Brooklyn, the median home goes now for 900,000. In Manhattan, it's 1.3 million. How do you address housing affordability in New York?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  It's so important and those numbers are not going to go down and we have to be honest with ourselves about that. We also have to be honest about what we are doing. On Monday, you'll have people marching for affordable housing. We must get housing for people. It's unfair not to have housing. And on Tuesday, they march and say, you can't build it on my block. And so there's several things we must do. Number one, we must keep people in their homes. Those are children and families who we had an amazing program years ago called the Advantage Program. If someone felt a few dollars behind in their rents, we would compensate and assist them to keep them in the home because it's cheaper

• 32:10Speaker 01

  and more cost effective to keep people in their homes than to have them placed in a shelter. So we should lean into that emergency cash assistance. We should allow the process to be easier instead of the bureaucracy that's associated with it now. Second, single adults. We must rethink the SRO model, a modernized version.

• 32:33Ezra Klein?

  Can you say, I'm sorry, can you say what the SRO model is for people not familiar?

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yes, those are the models where we had one rooms where people were able to share a building where there were one room where people have, it's almost like a kitchenette style.

• 32:49Ezra Klein?

  Like sort of dormitories or boarding houses, that kind of thing.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. If just starting out, it's a great start out for you. My first apartment was a kitchenette. It was small as heck, but darn it, it was mine. And I was so proud of that space and allowed me to eventually purchase a co-op and then purchase a multifamily house. And so there's a way to elevate people instead of placing them in what's called congregant type housing. And we need to really support more of those type housing with wraparound services for those who need support for employment, for mental health issues. We have about 25,000 rooms where many of these hotels are boarded up or about to shut down that we can go in and repurpose them.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  And it's a shorter period of time to do so than if we try to do ground up construction. That's where we should be investing our dollars.

• 33:47Ezra Klein?

  A lot of the opposition to development, to building new housing projects, takes as its core argument that more development, pretty much always and everywhere, means more gentrification, that it's pushing people out of the city, that it's replacing cultural structures and byways and equilibriums that are important, should be preserved. How do you understand just what gentrification is? And then the way it plays into these fights?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  I don't think gentrification is ethnicity. I think it's a mindset. This has always been a country and city where people have come and moved in and brought with them their ideas and their spirits to add to the cultural norm that existed before their arrival. But when you come to the city to displace, when you come to the city to build miniature communities within a community and don't respect the communities that were there beforehand, or when you use city agencies to harass tenants, when you call 9/11 all the time, 311 to complain about pre-existing restaurants and businesses,

• 34:57Speaker 01

  when you want your children to sit in classrooms that are all of one economic or ethnic groups and don't want to create a real synergy, when you separate, to me, that's gentrification. And that is something that's unacceptable because it's disrespectful to the people who were there. But when you come into the city with that, "I brought a cake for your neighbor next door" mindset, and I'm here and I want to use my skills and abilities to help the community continue to grow, that's a real win for all of us. And what we've witnessed in our city, we have used zoning process where we've upzoned

• 35:39Speaker 01

  in certain parts of the city and poorer communities. And that's what led to the displacement. I say we need to look at the entire city. We need to start talking about upzoning from 34th Street down to 14th Street, from 9th Avenue over to Park Avenue. We need to look at those sacred cows like Soho and other parts of the city where we use these methods to keep out groups. We must all share the affordable housing crises and every community board should be giving a number and told that you must come up with where you're going to place your affordable housing in your community board.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  And if you don't do it, then our planning board would come up with the plan to put affordable housing in the community. One solution must solve a multitude of problems. If we integrate these several communities, we're also going to integrate the schools. We're going to integrate access to healthy food, to good transportation, and start to bring people in a city that should be more integrated than it is. We are extremely segregated as a city and our housing plays a major role in that segregation.

• 36:52Ezra Klein?

  I really like your plan to begin the upzoning in wealthier neighborhoods first instead of lower income neighborhoods first. I think it's really important from an equity perspective and also somebody who's followed housing politics for a minute here. I've watched efforts to upzone these places fail again and again because the residents are so effective at immediately organizing against any change. So how do you plan to overcome that political challenge? That flooding at the city council meetings, the just unwillingness among residents of these wealthier areas to see them change because it'll block a view, it'll change the character, it'll change a housing value, whatever it might be?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  And that's why it's so important to do this through the community board, to create the partnerships. Don't attempt to dictate right away. Go to the community boards and say, here's X number of units of affordable housing you must build in the city. And we must use every power within our control to ensure that the community board lives up to that. Give them the infrastructure and the support to make right and smart planning decisions. But we're not backing away that every community board must have their share of affordable housing.

• 38:27Ezra Klein?

  I want to ask you some questions here about your broad political approach. Your campaign, I would say it's fair to say, didn't follow the conventional wisdom at that point for a Democrat look into in a primary election in a very heavily blue city. And yet you actually did put together a working class, multi-ethnic coalition that all the other folks promised they would. So let me ask it this way. What's the Eric Adams theory of the median voter? What did you understand about the voters that some of your competitors or some other Democrats don't?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Well, it was two months, Ezra, that I was campaigning with the other candidates. And I noticed something. They wanted to be heard. I wanted to be felt. I wanted to weave together narratives of my journey. We are hardwired as human beings to hear stories that would touch us. And I intentionally laid out from childhood to having learning disabilities, to being arrested, to being a dishwasher, to going to school at night, to struggling, to living on the verge of homelessness.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  I gave New Yorkers a series of vignettes, a series of stories, that they were able to move past the intellectual, the philosophical, the theoretical, all of these smart people who never had missed meal cramps. And each time I stood in front of a group of people and gave them another peek into who I am, they said to themselves, he's one of us. He's one of us.

• 40:09Ezra Klein?

  In 2020, Democratic support among Black voters declined by about 1% to 2%, it seems. Hispanic support dropped by about 8% to 9%. Why do you think that is?

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Well, I believe that we're not spending enough time on the ground. We're not dealing with those kitchen table issues. New Yorkers and Americans are not complicated at all.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  They want to get up in a place that's their own. They want to go to a place where they're gainfully employed and honest, pay for an honest day. They want their children to be educated in an environment where they can be ready for the future. And they want to be safe. And so the covenant between the city and its residents is a clear covenant. They pay their taxes. The city through its agencies provide the delivery of goods and services. Residents have done their jobs for years. The city has not.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  And it's just time for the city just to do his job. And until Democrats understand that is all Americans and New Yorkers are asking for. We're going to continue to lose people in the party. We have to rethink it. We've become too complicated. And we just have to communicate to our constituency as the average person. We govern in, as, as Mario Cuomo would say. You campaign in poetry and you govern in policy. We campaign in policy.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  And then try to govern in long policy that takes just too long to deal with the crises that we're facing. The public, they want someone that can bear the weight of the city. But they also want someone that they can share a beer with. That's all they want, you know? And I, I, I was clear on the campaign trail. There's nothing special about me. I'm just here to serve. And I'm focused on serving. And when you wore that bulletproof vest for 22 years and you responded to those 911 calls. You just have a different love affair with this city. You see the best the city has to offer. You see some of the worst things that happens to human beings.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  But you stay committed and steadfast. And that's what I did on the campaign trail. And I said, if I just show New Yorkers who I am, they'll make the determination on who they want to be their next mayor.

• 42:50Ezra Klein?

  But let me ask you about one of the pieces of this that I do think Democrats often struggle with, and it seems to me, actually, you may too, which is, problems are often complicated. And it's something you're telling me here. When you say you want to be an upstream kind of mayor, you want to focus on the way dyslexia later in people's life can lead to crime, can lead to poverty. You want to focus on zoning housing, which could then be built over a matter of years, a kind of slow, I don't want to exactly say slow, but a real effort at rebuilding trust between police and communities through dialogue, through new people entering the force. These things take time. Democrats always want to focus on root causes, and people are often pissed about what's happening in their lives

• 43:32Ezra Klein?

  now. So as you're thinking about entering a job where you'll get judged based on how things are, you know, a couple of years into the future, how do you make sure the upstream approach delivers present benefits?

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Because the goal is to do, a term I use often, we must have intervention and prevention. They go together. We historically focus on intervention, what we do right now, because we're afraid of the bad story, we're afraid of the bad headline, we're always trying to get the next election. And so we are constantly chasing the crises. And it takes a lot of discipline to focus on prevention while we're dealing with intervention. And so if we just look at crime, I'm going to reinstitute an anti-gun unit, plainclothes, to go after the guns and gangs in our city. I'm going to make sure that we stop ATVs riding up

• 44:33Speaker 01

  and down our sidewalks with just state of disorder and openly using heroin inside our parks without any form of enforcement. Or walking into the drain reeds or the Rite Aid and just having a shopping bag and just emptying the shopping bag and no one is stopping the person from shoplifting because it's just become open season. And so we have to address that. That's the intervention. That is how we bring back the level of confidence in our city, that we are safe, orderly place. But at the same time, I want to deal with the prevention. People talk about closing Rikers Island. I want to close the pipeline that feeds Rikers Island.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  And we can do it by partnering with Assemblywoman Joanne Simon and Assemblyman Carol, and do this inexpensive way of identifying dyslexia. So we have to start building out the pipeline of prevention. I want to give support to foster care children so they don't go to a life of crime and a life of falling, slipping through the cracks. So when you look at our healthcare system, like my Bellevue project, we're doing lifestyle medicine where people can actually reverse their chronic diseases like I was able to do so. It doesn't mean we're not going to still deal with people who need healthcare right now. But while we're doing that, we need to start building out long-term solutions.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  And it may not be under my watch. I may build the foundation that the next mayor would be able to build upon to continue of what the foundation has allowed us to do and what I put in place. But one thing for sure, we have to get started. We have to start moving in the right direction and we can't allow the fear of inertia to keep us standing still.

• 46:20Ezra Klein?

  I've got so many more questions, but I know you got to get to your next thing. So I appreciate the time you've given here. Always the final question on the show. What are three books you've read that have influenced you and you'd recommend to the audience?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Well, I have to start with mine. Healthy at Last. Every time I read it, I find another nugget and say, wow, this was a good point that I made. But the second was Dr. Dispensers' series. His books are amazing. Breaking the Habits of Being You, You Are the Placebo. There's several others. And a book that I recently stumbled on after saying upstream for so long, I just read a good book called Upstream. And it talks about how living our lives upstream. If I could get to number four, Atomic Habits. What are the small things we do every day to just change the habits that have really

• 47:14Speaker 01

  kept us and held us back from our full personhoods? There are little things we can do every day. You don't have to join a gym. Just do one jumping jack today and tomorrow do two and then the next day do three. Before you know it, you're doing a hundred and you're going to add on to that. And so those small habits will go a long way. And those are the four books that I enjoy.

• 47:35Ezra Klein?

  What's one atomic habit you added?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  There are several. I reached a point where I stopped doing my breathing exercises, which is just so powerful. And I think we need to teach children breathing, breath work in schools. But I stopped doing them for a while. And I stated that, you know what? Even if I only do one minute of breathing, I'm going to do them. And even my meditation that I do in the morning, sometimes you think you don't have enough time, but just do three minutes. And before you know it, you're going to do the 20 minute anyway. And that's what Atomic Habits is all about. The most difficult part of doing what's right is starting.

• 48:13Ezra Klein?

  Eric Adams, thank you very much.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Thank you. Appreciate you, Ezra. Take care.

• 48:28Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It's produced by Jeff Geld, Roshay Karma, and Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.