Meet the Candidates
Eric Adams
Shaun Donovan
Kathryn Garcia
Ray McGuire
Dianne Morales
Scott Stringer
Maya Wiley
Andrew Yang
A MAYORAL GUIDE FOR NYC CREATIVE COMMUNITIES
This race is too important to not take a position, so for the first time we are endorsing candidate Maya Wiley who best represents our progressive values. Her vision for New York is one with more racial and economic equality and justice. The future leader of the country’s largest city will be grappling with important issues while steering an economy that is among the greatest in the world — If it were an independent nation, New York’s economy would rank 10 th largest. We believe that Wiley is the best candidate to do this.
With ranked voting, remember that you should only rank candidates that you approve of, as any ranked position helps that candidate. For example, if you approve of four candidates, rank all four in order of your preference. If you approve of just one, then vote only for that one without ranking any others.
In the Soho/Noho/Tribeca and Chinatown City Council District 1, where the Downtown for democracy office is located, we endorse Chris Marte for City Council. Marte is against the plan to rezone much of Soho and Tribeca that would displace residents and clear the way for mega developments. Marte supports affordable housing in converted office space and protecting historic districts. Needless to say, this is essential for the cultural and creative communities.
Maya Wiley
Endorsed by Downtown for Democracy
Lawyer, professor, and social justice activist Maya Wiley grew up immersed in progressive ideology. Her father, George Wiley, was a civil rights leader, and her mother, Wretha Hanson—an art gallery director—was once a vice-presidential nominee for the Citizens Party. Such a steady diet of political engagement must have strongly influenced her adult identity as a civil-rights litigator, who lobbied Congress to end racial disparities and health-care reform and co-founded the Center for Social Inclusion, a nonprofit dedicated to dismantling structural racism.
She brought this perspective and expertise to her position as chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which provided her with a bird’s-eye view of the racial and class inequities in current police culture and convinced her of the urgent need for police reform. As a solution to these problems, she advocates the permanent removal of police from any situation involving mental health crisis management, school safety, and immigration enforcement.
Wiley’s housing vision is no less uncompromising, recommending direct rent relief for small landlords in exchange for not evicting renters, as well as a rapid rehousing program for the homeless. It also calls for the state legislature to create new taxes on the wealthy to fund initiatives that would generate more affordable places to live in the city.
Wiley hasn’t forgotten the creative community, either—to the tune of $100 million, part of which would provide direct grants for artists and cultural workers to help arts in the city recover from the doldrums of the Covid pandemic.
Meet the Other Candidates
Eric Adams
Mayoral candidate Eric Leroy Adams served as a transit policeman and then an NYPD officer for a total of 22 years before becoming the current Borough President of Brooklyn. He is also a published author who writes about food and health.
Adams, who is the first African-American to be elected Brooklyn Borough President claims to have discovered his calling as a cop at 15, after being arrested with his brother for criminal trespassing. The two were beaten in police custody by white cops, and a local pastor treated his PTSD by suggesting he join the police force to reform it from within.
In 1997, Adams, a Democratic, lost a primary for a Congressional seat and switched parties to become a registered Republican. By 2001, he had switched back to the Democratic Party and was elected to the New York State Senate. During this tenure, he served as co-chair of the State Legislators Against Illegal Guns and demonstrated his passion for gun control by joining five other State Congress representatives who wore hooded sweatshirts to the legislative chapter to protest the shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. After four terms, he became Brooklyn Borough President in 2013.
Adams has shown his support for housing rights by encouraging New York City to build affordable dwellings on municipally owned properties. He also announced a $10 million lawsuit against Kushner Companies that accused them of engaging in illegal construction practices. He has proposed a solution to the housing shortage by supporting the idea of adding more housing density to affluent communities, rather than only low-income neighborhoods. Adams’s proposals regarding immigration seem lacking to some. For one thing, he has never proposed civil rights prohibitions to stem the collaboration that has been occurring between city law enforcement and ICE.
Shaun Donovan
From 2004 to 2009, Mayoral candidate Shaun Donovan served under Mayor Bloomberg as Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. During that time, he authored the Marketplace Plan to build 160,000 affordable homes, the largest city- sponsored plan of this nature in U.S. history.
From 2009 to 2014, he served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the cabinet of President Obama. HUD, the federal agency that provides the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) with 90% of its capital funding, has since been accused of a massive coverup of the cases of lead-poisoned children living under its auspices. Donovan has insisted he was unaware of the problem and always relied on the information brought to him by his subordinates.
In his bid for mayor, Donovan is promising a more hands-on approach to fixing the problems of the Housing Authority. He has vowed to spend $2 billion of the annual city budget on building upgrades. He has also touted a program he devised known as the Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD.
Under this program, the NYCHA will retain ownership of housing but delegate all management and upkeep to privately owned companies. In addition, rent would be kept at no more than 30% of a tenant’s income and enhanced by a federal subsidy. Donovan has also promised to invest $500 million annually in community-focused public safety and racial equality efforts. To pay for this, funds currently devoted to law enforcement and corrections will be reallocated.
Kathryn Garcia
Kathryn R. Garcia served as commissioner for the New York City Sanitation Department and was interim chair and CEO of the New York City Housing Authority and “food czar” of the city’s emergency program during the COVID-19 emergency response. While at the Department of Environmental Protection during the Bloomberg administration, she instituted efficiency measures that saved the agency $30 million and helped restore 42 pumping stations and a wastewater treatment plant damaged by Hurricane Sandy. During her tenure as food czar during the COVID-19 pandemic, Garcia arranged for the distribution of free meals at more than 400 schools as well as a home delivery program that used 11,000 taxi drivers to provide daily meals to seniors.
One of the main factors that made Garcia decide to run for Mayor was her disappointment in Mayor De Blasio’s handling of the Covid-19 epidemic. “During the pandemic it became very clear to me that who is mayor really matters,” she told the media at the time of her mayoral candidate announcement.
A key element of Garcia’s platform has to do with public space and transportation. Since a reliable, safe transportation system is key to recovery, she would like to reduce the congestion caused by delivery companies, especially those belonging to Amazon.
While serving on the NYCHA, Garcia did not escape the blame leveled on that organization for its part in the highly publicized lead-paint scandal. She was accused of omitting details about it when she was asked to testify.
After confronting all eight mayoral candidates with a battery of questions, The New York Times singled out Garcia for their endorsement, lauding her as a “go-to problem solver” who successfully ran “an overwhelmingly male Sanitation Department.” They commended her for her expert handling of the city’s damaged wastewater systems during Superstorm Sandy, for modernizing a system that tracks 19,000 miles of snowplow lanes, and for cutting commercial garbage truck traffic in half, among other past achievements.
However, it was just as much Garcia’s mayoral platform that convinced the Times to support her. That platform includes providing free childcare up to age 3 for families earning less than $70,000 a year, designing bilingual programs for every elementary school, transforming Rikers Island into a hub for renewable energy with charging stations for the city’s electric vehicle fleet, and expanding rapid bus lanes. She also promised to reform the police department by accelerating and strengthening the disciplinary process, making promotions more equitable, raising the age of recruits to 25 from 21, and requiring them to live in the five boroughs.
Ray McGuire
Former Citigroup executive Raymond J. McGuire was born in Dayton, Ohio, and later earned an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School and a Juris Doctor from their law school. He was one of the longest-serving African Americans to hold an executive position on Wall Street. A large portion of the $5 million he has raised for his mayoral campaign came from corporate America and the real estate industry, but he lost a mayoral endorsement from The New York Times partly by guessing that the median price of a home in Brooklyn was “in the $80,000 to $90,000 range” ($900,000 is closer to it).
McGuire portrays himself as acutely aware of the pickle into which small businesses were thrust by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, losing 40% of their revenue compared to the year before. To remedy this, he promises subsidizing the salaries of 50,000 small business employees for one year. This plan should cost the government nearly $900 million. McGuire would also like to reform the city’s property tax system but insists that any changes must occur gradually.
McGuire is an art collector who is a board member of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum. He would like to strengthen arts education by requiring the Department of Cultural Affairs and Department of Education to form partnerships with local arts institutions. McGuire’s proposals for police reform tend to be more cautious than those of his political rivals. He favors appointing a deputy mayor to oversee the NYPD and increasing community policing activities but seems more likely to want to review the public safety budget for cost-saving ideas than to defund the police.
Dianne Morales
Mayoral candidate Dianne Morales is Afro-Latina, with parents hailing from Puerto Rico. She has a Master of Social Administration from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Master of Education Administration from Columbia University. She was instrumental in opening the Office of Youth Development and School-Community Services while working at the New York City Department of Education. She was also executive director of The Door, a youth aid organization that serves over 11,000 people a year as well as the executive director of Phipps Neighborhoods in the South Bronx, designed to fight poverty.
Since Morales announced her bid for mayor, she has been extremely vocal about number of topics including the reformation of the NYCHA, a citywide school integration program, improving mass transit, constructing affordable housing, guaranteeing a minimum income, promoting worker cooperatives, cutting New York’s police budget in half, and electing a police oversight body. She has also called for a community first-responders department to replace police in dealing with situations involving homelessness and mental health.
The media has singled out Morales as one of the most progressive candidates to enter the mayoral race. Her political career is marred only by one small blemish that occurred when a crooked water inspector from the Department of Environmental Protection convinced Morales, a first-time home buyer, to offer him a $300 bribe in order to avoid what he claimed was her $12,500 water bill. The small scandal was not enough to interfere with her momentum, however, and she continues to be the candidate with the third-highest number of contributors of donations that, on average, are small, a sure sign of true grassroots support.
Scott Stringer
Scott M. Stringer, the current New York City Comptroller, earned his political chops in the 80s, when he became Assemblyman Jerry Nadler’s legislative assistant. In 1992, he replaced Nadler in the State Assembly, where he served for 13 years.
During Stringer’s state congressional career, he stood at the forefront of the fight against “empty-seat” voting and became an outspoken advocate for affordable housing. In addition, if you’re one of the thousands of New Yorkers who navigates that city by bicycle, you can thank Stringer for instituting bike lanes during his tenure as Borough President and for ordering studies of bike lanes to raise awareness about using them safely.
Stringer has portrayed himself as free of any pressures from our titans of real estate, and he is the only candidate for mayor who signed a pledge not to take direct donations from real estate developers. Nevertheless, a recent investigation by Politico maintains he accepted money from various other entities connected to the real estate industry.
Stringer’s 22-point public health care reform plan, called “Healing NYC,” hasn’t shied away from harsh criticisms of the de Blasio administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it also calls for greater attention to the health of underserved communities in the city’s five Burroughs.
Stringer has consistently portrayed himself as the immigrant’s friend by advocating the sending of interpreters to legal services organizations and supporting the elimination of all cooperation between the NYPD and ICE. He has also proposed the creation of a New York City Citizenship Fund to provide support for immigrants applying for citizenship.
One stain on Stringer’s career that has been hard to launder was the accusation of sexual assault leveled by a political lobbyist, who charged that Stringer “assaulted” her sexually while she was working for him as an unpaid intern in 2001. Stringer denied these allegations and, despite losing some endorsements, was able to continue raising money for his campaign after they became public.
Andrew Yang
American businessman, politician, and author Andrew M. Yang began his career as a lawyer, working for startups and other early-stage companies. In 2011, he founded Venture for America (VFA), a nonprofit designed to help cities recover from the Great Recession. The VFA quickly received national attention, some of it coming from the Obama administration. Eventually, the organization was criticized by some for creating only 150 jobs, after setting a goal of 100,000.
Yang’s political perspective has been termed a “technocratic approach,” exemplified by one of his presidential campaign slogans: “Not Left, Not Right. Forward.” This perspective is closely related to his concept of “human-centered capitalism,” one of the central tenets of which is awarding a $1,000 “freedom dividend” to all citizens over the age of 18. Yang believes such a program would create as many as 2 million new jobs, but for those already receiving other benefits, such as welfare, this dividend would replace a part of that stipend.
Yang has spoken in support of Medicare for all, but he also wants to keep private insurance available. He is wholly in favor of legislation that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identify and would also like to see pro-choice judges appointed. He is in favor of rezoning to increase affordable housing and repairing New York City’s public housing to reduce homelessness.
Yang has not forgotten the creative community and has said that Broadway productions should be brought to public parks with a low-ticket price. He is in favor of attracting “content creator collectives” with cutting-edge technologies to the city to allow young artists to collaborate with one another.