In the first of the Star’s interviews with the 2025 mayoral candidates, Lander discusses his plans to make CUNY free, reveals where the letters of the Kentile Floors sign went, and shares a surprising story from Brooklyn D.A. Eric Gonzalez, involving a murder, a pizza delivery guy, and a priest.
Comptroller Brad Lander stopped by the Star’s offices on Friday to talk about his campaign to become NYC’s next mayor. Photo: Mohamed Farghaly
By JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
Last summer, as Brad Lander lay in his dentist’s office in Gowanus, the hygienist paused, holding the Novocaine needle in the air so that it glinted in the light. “Comptroller,” she said, “I thought every three-year-old was supposed to get a 3K slot.” Eric Adams had promised universal child care, but the city had since fallen 10,000 seats short of its goal, to the hygienist’s dismay. “I’m 140th on the waitlist,” she said, grimly. Lander quickly committed to seeing that the program covered everyone. But she may not have needed the needle — even when not under duress, Lander has styled himself, in contrast to Adams, as a sober reformer dedicated to fiscal responsibility and accountable governance.
Though a fixture of New York politics for decades, Lander’s rise has been relatively slow and steady. Born in St. Louis, MO, he moved to the city when he was 23 and began to work on affordable housing, eventually running two organizations that advocated for tenants’ rights. Next, he spent 15 years on the City Council, where he helped found the Progressive Caucus. Since 2021, he’s served as comptroller, a role he describes as being the “city’s watchdog,” managing pension funds and auditing government contracts. There’s only one rung higher in city government, and that’s mayor — a post for which Lander will be on the ballot, come November.
Yet roughly eight months out, the race is already crowded. Lander is one of nine candidates who have announced mayoral bids, and that’s not counting former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who leads the polls but has yet to officially enter the fray. To win, he would have to overcome the embattled incumbent, Eric Adams — Politico has called Lander the current mayor’s “archrival” — and distinguish himself from a pack of progressives with similar policies, including state Senator Jessica Ramos and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. In the process, he’ll have to navigate two hot-button issues for New York Democrats: affordability and public safety.
“People are pissed off with government that’s not working for them,” Lander told the Brooklyn Star during a recent roundtable. “People feel like the cost of living is going through the roof: the rent’s up, home prices are up, child care costs so much that I can’t afford to live here. It doesn’t feel safe and secure, and I don’t see government fighting for me.”
Subway crime in particular has been a flashpoint for conversations around safety, and left-leaning candidates like Lander have taken note. In an interview with the New York Editorial Board last December, he acknowledged that “progressives, including myself, were slow to respond to the growing sense of disorder coming out of the pandemic,” and at the roundtable he reaffirmed his support for more proactive security measures, albeit with a caveat.
“Sometimes you do still need involuntary hospitalization,” Lander said, adding that as mayor he would expand law enforcement’s ability to require people perceived as “‘dangerous” to undergo medical examination, a proposal that was seen as fraught in 2022 when it was rejected by state Democrats, yet which now has broad approval. “And I support more officers in the subway, especially at night, which is what the governor is doing,” said Lander. “But the real answer is getting people connected to housing with the services they need.” That response dovetails with Lander’s background as a housing advocate, which continues to inform his approach to the city’s problems writ large.
But the issue of subway security had recently become more personal. Midway through the roundtable, Lander paused to take a call from an NYPD officer. The eight-year-old daughter of one of Lander’s friends was pushed to the ground by a homeless person with a mental illness on the subway, and the officer was following up with Lander. “I’m just trying to make sure the dots get connected and that guy can get care,” he said. “And then she also wouldn’t have to see [her attacker] there [in the station] every day.”
Lander’s elevator pitch to New Yorkers is that he’s less corrupt than the big-name candidates, and more proven than the small ones. In that sense, he’s positioning himself as a foil both to Cuomo and Adams — who have a track record of getting things done, but also skeletons in their closets — and to his fellow progressives, whom he portrays as honest yet less battle-tested.
Based on the latest polling, that narrative seems like it could be a winning formula. A survey last week by the Manhattan Institute simulated ranked choice voting and found that Lander survived until the penultimate round, where he was narrowly edged out by Adams, who then lost to Cuomo. Yet pollsters caution that early results like these are often a function of name recognition: over 70% of respondents did not know of Ramos, Mamdani, or state Senator Zellnor Myrie, and despite topping the simulation, both Cuomo and Adams also draw the highest unfavorable ratings. Only 55% knew Lander, placing him in a middle zone along with ex-Comptroller Scott Stringer, but time will tell whose cause is boosted most by greater attention as the race progresses.
A poll by the Manhattan Institute gives Lander the best odds of challenging Cuomo and Adams, the controversial heavyweights. Courtesy of the Manhattan Institute
The deeper issue, one not unique to Lander, is that New Yorkers haven’t been voting. Turnout in the 2021 mayoral election was an abysmal 21%, the lowest in seven decades and a drop from the 26% of 2017 and 2013. To be fair, New York is not an outlier: Dallas saw a shocking 7% turnout in its last mayoral contest, making double digits seem like a blessing. But in an age of bombastic, social media-oriented populists, can a relatively measured, scandal-free white liberal policy wonk like Lander, preaching a message akin to “eat your vegetables,” energize voters enough to reverse that course?
Lander is banking on it. “To me, this campaign is about who can lead a safer, more affordable, and better-run city,” he told the Star, “and get people excited about a [local government] that has their back.” He touted his work on the Gowanus rezoning, which has paved the way for over 8,000 units, with 3,000 earmarked as affordable, as a model for tackling the housing crisis — and the Interborough X (IBX), a proposed light rail line connecting Brooklyn and Queens, would be another opportunity to build homes, he said. He would make CUNY free, he noted, and institute a scheme for teachers and city workers that would leverage pension funds to double their purchasing power when searching for housing.
While leftist candidates are increasingly accepting safety as a paradigm, many of their underlying policies haven’t changed so much as the framing around them has. Explaining his stance on immigration, Lander offered a story Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez had shared earlier in the day. He knew that Gonzalez had joined law enforcement after his brother was murdered. But he hadn’t known about the sole witness, a pizza delivery person who hesitated to come to the police precinct because he was undocumented. Five years after the shooting, a conversation with his priest sparked a crisis of conscience, and he finally told the NYPD what he had seen. Yet, sure enough, the defense counsel had him deported before he could testify.
“Downstairs, there are ICE flyers on the doors of the buildings. People are reporting raids, they’re terrified,” Lander said at the Star’s office, casting Gonzalez’s story as a parable of how targeting migrants can backfire. “The city gets more dangerous if you don’t protect people and keep them safe.”
As the roundtable came to a close, talk shifted to local Brooklyn lore. After the legendary Kentile Floors sign was taken down in 2014, Lander’s office saved the letters, but he couldn’t convince the owners of any nearby structures to display them. “We should try again,” he said. “On top of one of those new buildings, maybe!” The light was reddening on the table, and the conversation started to rove across the other boroughs. “This city is so incredible,” Lander said. “During the pandemic, we worried whether people would want to be in this diverse place, but they really do. It’s the most amazing city on the planet — you have things like Shakespeare in the Park, and Diwali at Richi Rich Palace. But,” he noted, growing serious again, “you’ve got to have a place to live that’s affordable.”
At least eight other candidates would agree — there’s consensus that making New York City cheaper and safer is the job at hand. The race is young, but the open question will be whether Lander’s bona fides as a housing activist and resume as comptroller will persuade voters that he’s the one to do it.
Mohamed Farghaly contributed reporting.
