New York City Comptroller Brad Lander Delivered Remarks at the Association for a Better New York

This morning, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander delivered remarks at the Association for a Better New York (ABNY) Power Breakfast. Watch full remarks here.

Comptroller Lander’s testimony as prepared for delivery is below:

Good morning, ABNY! Thank you Steven, Bill Rudin, and the whole ABNY Board, and to Chad, Zina, and Wiley for organizing today’s event. I’m grateful for the chance to talk with you about our city’s future.

I think it’s safe to say, we’re all here because we love this city. I love it so much, I couldn’t help but follow one of its time-honored Comptroller traditions : running for Mayor.

In all seriousness, I fall in love with NYC over and over again. For me, it’s Celebrate Brooklyn concerts in Prospect Park, the view from the High Bridge, or finding a new street food.

Have you tried fuschka yet? Messy, but delicious.

But lately, I have to say, not a day goes by where New Yorkers don’t stop me to express their frustration with the city’s direction. The messages are always the same: People want a safer, more affordable, more livable, and better run city.

They want to feel safe taking the subway, or walking their dogs in the evening. They want buses that run on time, and libraries that are open when you need them. They want to trust their government. And believe they have a place in our city’s future. Right now, they don’t.

You can see it in the data: like this recent survey by CBC, which shows dramatic declines in how folks in every neighborhood feel about quality of life, safety, affordability, and city services.

Just a few weeks ago, I was sitting in the dentist’s chair, when my hygienist said: “Mr. Lander, I thought every three-year-old was supposed to get a 3K slot in our neighborhood. Why are we 140th on the wait list?” Not the shot of novocaine I was expecting!

As our city’s chief accountability officer, what I hope to do this morning is: 

• give voice to those concerns 

• put them in some context 

• and prompt a conversation with you about how we move our city forward.

The first thing I want to say is that this is not a time for ideology or political “lanes.” This is about actually delivering that better-run city that New Yorkers are so hungry for.

There are so many priorities that New Yorkers overwhelmingly agree on – whether they identify as conservative or moderate or progressive, as I have been called once or twice.

I know for many of you, this moment feels familiar. ABNY was born in the 1970s, at another moment of crisis. Some of it caused by broader economic transitions. But much of it by the City’s own fiscal mismanagement.  At that time, a small number of tried and true New Yorkers stepped up to the table, led by Lew Rudin and Robert Tisch, who galvanized civic leaders from across the political spectrum into conversations about how to get the city back on its feet. At the same time those civic leaders stepped up, neighborhood leaders did the same, creating new community development corporations from Bed-Stuy to the Northwest Bronx.

I started my career at one of those groups, the Fifth Avenue Committee in Brooklyn, where I had the honor to work with leaders like Fran Justa and Barbara Bethel, who would not quit on their neighbors, who rescued their blocks from abandonment – and who taught me what grit and resilience looks like –  what it means to be a New Yorker.

I want to shout out Kathy Wylde, who was one of the bridge-builders between the neighborhood and civic leaders. And I want to express my condolences to the family and friends of Harrison J. Goldin, who was the comptroller then, and who passed away earlier this week.

Those early leaders of ABNY did not agree on everything. Which is good, because Kathy definitely does not always agree with me.

And Jay Goldin clashed even more fiercely with Abe Beame and Ed Koch than I do with the current mayor.

Still, through partnerships that included City Hall, leaders in business, finance, and real estate, labor unions, and community groups, they led the way for New York City not just to escape the fiscal crisis, but to thrive again.

ABNY has translated the “I Love NY” slogan – that you created – into a call to action that has resounded across five decades.

Fifty years later, we still love New York. And we face a set of similar challenges.

The pandemic was a profound shock, causing lasting disruptions.

The abrupt shift to remote work upended working patterns, doubling vacant office space, now at more than 100m square feet.

Elevated levels of mental illness pushed more New Yorkers out onto the streets. 

Violent crime is up from before the pandemic, and reducing at a slower rate than many other cities.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing New York’s families? The skyrocketing cost of housing.

As the city rebounded from the fiscal crisis, population surged, but we did not build enough housing. So rents and sales prices are at all-times highs.

Meanwhile, the city’s popularity presents new challenges, as more than 200,000 asylum-seekers have arrived over the past 2 years.

Our streets are feeling more chaotic, with the ubiquity of mopeds and e-bikes, and the rampant growth of illegal weed shops.

It all adds up to a growing sense of unease – real anxieties about New York City’s economy, our public safety, and our future.

As in the 70s, some of these were forces beyond our control.

But they are compounded every day:

• by the lack of vision from City Hall to navigate those shifts 

• the lack of management to deliver on the basics 

• and now by the shattered trust and distraction in the wake of multiple investigations.

On mental health, for example: my office’s audit of the City’s Intensive Mobile Treatment program – a key lever to move mentally ill homeless New Yorkers off the streets – showed that the program is failing not just to connect participants to housing, but even just to medication and care.

One example: Rashid Brimmage was in the IMT program after a long history of psychotic episodes and arrests, including pushing a 92-year-old woman to the ground. When a hospital released him, they had no way to tell his IMT team, who lost track of him. Instead, a NY Times reporter found him aimlessly riding the subway days later, his hospital bracelet still on his wrist, while she was reporting on the failures of our mental health systems.

Meanwhile, in 2019 the City announced it would build several hundred secure hospital beds precisely for people like Rashid, who have been arrested and require secure detention, hospitalization, and psychiatric care.

Five years later, ZERO of those beds have been constructed.

I could spend the rest of this speech walking through equally scathing reports from my office – on delays in affordable housing construction, storm preparedness, food stamps. But I think you mostly already know it.

And I could give an entire speech just on the importance of public integrity – in fact, just this week, my office released a new plan to crack down on corruption in the procurement process.  

Suffice it to say, my definition of good government does not include multiple FBI investigations, no-bid contracts for family members, or old-school protection rackets.

What we need right now is high-quality, non-ideological, trustworthy, solutions-oriented leadership in City Hall.

That is what I am here to talk about today.

To start, we need a post-COVID vision for economic growth.

Our goal should be to re-create what Dan Doctoroff has stood before this audience and called: “The virtuous cycle of a successful city.”

I’ve long admired Dan, and learned from his work. As I told the Times last week, with a little trepidation, Dan is the New Yorker most like Robert Moses in terms of reshaping our city.

Fortunately, he told me he liked the quote.

Since his diagnosis with ALS, Dan’s courage and fortitude are only more remarkable – putting his genius to work finding a cure for ALS, while still helping find the way forward for New York City.

As he breaks it down, in “the virtuous cycle,” the city attracts tourists, students, employers, and talent, and the marginal cost of welcoming them is less than the revenue generated.

The growth dividends are reinvested into a vibrant public realm, yielding an economic and cultural infrastructure where innovation can thrive — and into a robust network of public services that make the city’s prosperity more inclusive and sustainable.

Eat your heart out, Robert Moses.

Getting community buy-in for growth and change is hard – but it’s worth doing. I was proud to initiate, champion, and build broad support for the Gowanus rezoning process. When it wasn’t always popular.

One of our early planning meetings was disrupted by anti-development activists ringing meditation bells that were somehow loud enough to drown out the meeting.

But over several years, we put together a table of homeowners, tenants, public housing residents, business-people, artists, advocates, and developers, and we put the question to them: What would shared and sustainable growth look like?

They articulated a vision:

• For keeping Gowanus creative and mixed use.   

• Of a diverse neighborhood, with lots of new housing, and renovating the public housing nearby. 

• Of cleaning up the Canal, and adding vibrant new public space.

We didn’t cram growth down people’s throats, with a little sweetener at the last minute.  

But we also didn’t let resistance to growth make us shy away.  

As a result, we passed the largest rezoning of the last decade with the support of the community board. 

Today, it’s generating 8,000 new homes, 3,000 affordable to working-class families, with new parkland, space for artists, and big investments in stormwater protection and NYCHA. 

I want to do for New York City what I did for Gowanus: lead the process for genuinely inclusive growth that delivers substantial new housing and jobs – and that’s built on solid foundations because New Yorkers see themselves thriving in it.

As Comptroller, my office has brought all our tools to bear on the housing crisis:

• We invested alongside CPC and Related to help save the 35,000 rent-stabilized units put at risk by the collapse of Signature Bank 

• We issued the City’s first three social bonds, financing over 12,000 units of deeply affordable housing, in neighborhoods all across the city  

• and we established the first responsible property management standards in the nation for investor-owned housing, working with some of the asset managers in this room 

We’ve done all that while achieving a 10% annual return on investments last year — better than CALPERS and CALSTRS — saving taxpayers $1.8 billion and propelling NYC’s pension funds to record size and a new ranking as the 3rd largest fund in the country.

Of course, much more is needed to build housing at the scale the affordability crisis demands.

We’re going to need to win New Yorkers onto the side of inclusive growth.

How can we do that?

I got one clue recently from my kids. We were a little anxious when they told us they had gotten tattoos – Meg and I aren’t really tattoo people.

But here’s what they showed us: My son had gotten the numbers of our address, in the font that graces the front of our home. And my daughter had hand-drawn a picture of our stoop. 

We almost cried – OK, fine, I did cry – because our Brooklyn row house has provided them with a sense of security and identity that they wanted permanently engraved on their arms.

Unfortunately, most New Yorkers don’t have that sense of security.

And even my own kids and their friends don’t think they’ll ever be able to buy a home here.

NYC has half the homeownership rate of the rest of the country.

We can change that.

One way we can help New Yorkers see themselves in growth is through a dramatically renewed focus on affordable homeownership.

Earlier this year, Assembly candidate Micah Lasher and I proposed a plan we call Homes for City Workers, to invest pension fund dollars alongside our teachers, cops, and firefighters when they buy homes in the five boroughs, doubling their purchasing power and creating the next generation of homeownership for our city’s public servants.

An even bolder idea is to connect affordable multifamily homeownership with upzoning.

Look, I support “City of Yes,” to allow a little more housing everywhere. But we’re going to need a lot more housing in some places.

So imagine this: What if we offered neighborhoods the opportunity to support significant upzoning, like we did in Gowanus – but with the proviso that a big chunk of new development would be affordable cooperative homeownership for people like them and their kids.

And we asked the first 5 neighborhoods to raise their hands for a pilot round.

We could launch the next generation of Mitchell-Lama style homeownership, made possible by new density in combination with City capital.

What better way of enabling New Yorkers to see themselves in growth than by imagining they could actually own a piece of it?

Another area where I think we all agree is that public safety is a key to prosperity.

New Yorkers can’t thrive amidst fear, gun violence, a mental health crisis.

Businesses won’t locate here and people from the suburbs won’t come back to Broadway unless we get this right.

Unfortunately, as the mayor’s own data released this week shows, he is just not getting the job done.

Crime is down from its pandemic spike — and far below historic highs from the 80s and 90s — but major felony crimes in NYC are up by 30% since before COVID. 

Compared to other cities, our efforts to reduce crime are middling — and the department is beset by federal investigations into its leaders.

Just across the river in Newark — a City that was once labeled a “war zone” and the 6th most dangerous city in the country — Mayor Ras Baraka – another City leader who’s been called progressive – has reduced the homicide rates to their lowest in more than 60 years.

Mayor Michelle Wu has done the same in Boston, where so far this year they’ve seen fewer than 10 murders, the lowest since they’ve been keeping track.

I spent some time with Mayor Wu recently.  And what she made clear is that one core component of improved public safety is better police management.

A great model is the work of the University of Chicago CrimeLab’s Police Leadership Academy, which I learned about recently from Kenneth Corey, a former NYPD Chief of Department. 

The academy provides hands-on training to police leaders, in management at the precinct and departmental levels, in using data effectively to focus on violence reduction, and in building community trust.

Here’s an example of a management-forward approach:  Recently WNYC released data on shootings in the City – providing a view that is actually more comprehensive than CompStat – which shows that since the pandemic, just 4% of New York City’s 120,000 blocks account for nearly all of the city’s shootings.

Many of those blocks are in the neighborhoods where we’ve increased funding for community-violence interrupters in recent years.

But there is currently no unified approach to use this data to guide our anti-violence efforts. We need a process that will integrate the NYPD, community-based efforts, and our DAs; and use data honestly and transparently to reduce shootings.

To comprehensively improve public safety, we also need to be honest about what’s outside the NYPD’s control.

Police are critical to prevent and respond to violence, get illegal guns off the streets, and solve crimes.

But no amount of policing will keep kids from skipping school, help people get good jobs, or connect homeless people to stable housing.

So today, I want to propose a partnership with you, and make a big, I Love NYC-scale promise:  

To end street homelessness for severely mentally ill people in our city.

A decade ago, New York City took a “housing first” approach and effectively ended veterans homelessness.

We can do the same for people with severe mental illness living on the street right now.

With better coordination between city agencies, hospitals, and social service providers we can prevent vulnerable New Yorkers like Rashid Brimmage from continually falling through the cracks.

We do need those secure detention beds I mentioned, because it is sometimes necessary to commit people involuntarily.

But it will be necessary a lot less often if we have more safe haven beds, and more supportive housing.

And here’s the linchpin: we should reserve a few thousand of our housing vouchers to help this vulnerable population get off the street and into housing right away – and connect them with the service dollars we’re already spending.

That’s the “housing first” model, and research by Urban Institute shows it works: people stay stably housed 70-90% of the time.

This is ambitious, but it will cost us less in new spending than you might think. Because we’re already spending billions of dollars here. What we need is to spend it more effectively – in a coordinated continuum of care, focused on outcomes, with commissioners knowing the Mayor is watching.

Some of you are already engaged in philanthropic work in this area, focused on what really works. I’d like to invite you into the conversation as we develop and implement it.

Because ending street homelessness of severely mentally ill people will mean a safer city, and a more compassionate one.

It will also be a great improvement for New York City’s public realm.

As Dan Doctoroff and Janette Sadik-Khan showed, public realm improvements in central business districts are keys to a thriving economy. 

That’s why we need to see congestion pricing through. 

And why I’m organizing the lawsuits aimed at reversing the Governor’s shortsighted decision to put it on pause.

In addition to the transit, traffic, and air quality benefits, when congestion pricing is implemented, we’ll have a once in a generation opportunity to reclaim street space. 

The reduction in congestion would free up 500 lane miles —  an area the size of Tribeca – room for transformative efforts like the Downtown Alliance’s vision for the Financial District.  

If we want support for those streetscape improvements, though, we’re going to need to rein in the chaos caused by the rise of mopeds and e-bikes.

Honestly, I probably hear more about this issue than any other right now. 

Like the other issues I’ve discussed today, this is largely about management. It’s not rocket science.  

We need to stem the supply of unlicensed vehicles at point-of-sale.  

Hold delivery apps financially accountable for their trips. 

Target enforcement to take illegal vehicles off the streets.

And use some of that freed-up street space for neighborhood loading zones, and wider protected bike lanes.

A vibrant city is not just streets, subways, and buildings. New York thrives through its social  

infrastructure.

That’s why the Mayor’s treating libraries, cultural institutions, and parks like sacrificial lambs in the budget process is terribly short-sighted.

Our vibrant arts scene and creative economy is a huge driver for why people want to live and work here.  

Can I see the hands of everyone here who serves on the board of an arts and cultural organization?  

I thought so. Thank you. It truly matters. 

One other critical piece of that social infrastructure is CUNY, probably our greatest engine of economic mobility.

I’m honored to see Chancellor Matos Rodríguez here today. He and his team are doing a great job — but it often feels like CUNY is an orphan, without broader support or attention.   

That’s why I’m calling for municipal control and an ambitious re-envisioning of CUNY for the 21st century.

My plan will show how we can integrate CUNY better with our city’s K-12 education, workforce development programs, and business partnerships.

We could also knit CUNY together more strongly with our city’s other great institutions of higher learning — did you know we have more university students here than there are people in Cleveland?  

A partnership like that will help secure the city’s centrality in the fields of the future – AI, climate technology, health care, and life sciences – and make sure New York City’s kids become the next generation of teachers, health professionals, tech innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders of tomorrow.

Take Yarys Lopez. 

When Yarys was 10, gangs threatened to burn down her family’s home in Honduras, so her mom scooped her up, and they fled.

They wound up homeless, living in a park in the Bronx. Her mom then took up with an abusive partner, and one day Yarys came home from middle-school to find her unconscious.

But at the Bronx Family Justice Center, they connected with a lawyer named Alison, who saved their lives. 

Yarys was so inspired that she wanted to be a lawyer, so she transferred to the Bronx High School for Law and Community Service, where she graduated as valedictorian.

And this spring, I watched Yarys graduate from CUNY’s Lehman College. 

She’s already working as a paralegal, helping new arrivals apply for legal status and work authorization. 

What made that happen? Yarys’ grit & determination, of course. She is remarkable.

But also well-run public institutions that focus on outcomes.

When we make City government run better, we make stories like Yarys possible.

In closing, I want to repeat what I said at the start:

We know what we need to do to bring NYC back – and it’s neither progressive nor conservative.  

It’s what works.

It starts with City Hall making sure we focus on the basics – keeping our streets clean, our neighborhoods safe, our services functioning. Setting clear goals and measuring outcomes.

Look, I know all of us in this room won’t always agree on everything.

I’m already looking forward to Kathy’s feedback on this speech!

But I also know we all love this city.

We’re dedicated not just to preserving what’s already great about it  – but to making room for new ideas, new developments, new leaders that will make it even better.

That’s going to require much better management, honest leadership, some vision – and real conversations like the one I hope we are starting this morning.

Next time, let’s do it over fuschka.

Thank you.

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