Can New York’s new mayor put the practical in progressive?

Don’t let the fact that New York Mayor-elect Eric Adams is an outspoken vegan fool you. 

Make no mistake, after being diagnosed with diabetes, Mayor-elect Adams embraced a plant-based diet and talks, often, about losing 35 pounds and seeing his health improve. The former state senator and then-Brooklyn borough president has become something of a public health evangelist, promoting a vegan lifestyle.

At the same time, New York City’s incoming mayor, a Brooklyn native and former captain in the New York Police Department, has cultivated a working-class coalition more likely to prefer barbecues and cream in their coffee instead of the kale smoothies he often champions.  

After he’s sworn into office on Jan. 1, Mr. Adams, who will become the second Black mayor in the history of the nation’s largest city, will in many ways offer a challenge to the ascendant progressive wing of the Democratic Party, bringing a personal style and vision of governance more pragmatic than ideological, observers say. 

Labeling himself a “practical progressive,” Mayor-elect Adams won a crowded primary with a pragmatic platform that emphasized public safety, decrying Democratic efforts to “defund the police.” He proclaimed during the campaign that New York “will no longer be anti-business.” And as he fills out his administration, he’s been less impressed with Ivy League degrees and establishment credentials than he has been with what he calls “emotional intelligence.”

“He is inclusive; he is pragmatic. It doesn’t matter the party; it doesn’t matter the race, the domestic group, or the power of money – he’s not going to be antagonizing or polarizing,” says Ramon Tallaj, a member of the mayor-elect’s transition team and founder and chairman of SOMOS Community Care, a nonprofit health network that serves Medicaid and Medicare recipients.

Over eight years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio vaulted unexpectedly into the national spotlight, a relative unknown with what many considered radical progressive views after 20 years of the tough-on-crime and pro-business administrations of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Mr. de Blasio effectively described New York as a “tale of two cities,” promising to both rein in the city’s yawning wealth disparities and radically reform the NYPD at the height of the stop-and-frisk era. After taking office, his first priority focused on animal rights, and he spent a significant amount of political capital trying to ban the city’s horse-drawn carriages in Central Park – an effort that famously flopped.

“In the course of constructing his administration, de Blasio made it more representative demographically, and moved it to the left ideologically,” says Ken Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College in Manhattan. “But it’s not clear that he addressed many of the everyday concerns of people living in the outer boroughs – and I say that as a kid who was born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn.”

Professor Sherrill also points out the deep cultural differences between the former officer born in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn and Mayor de Blasio, whose administration, he says, was in many ways made up of highly educated “ideas people” who frequent progressive study groups.

“What progressive people who call themselves progressive don’t understand is that lots of people who are excluded from society in the outer boroughs don’t hold views that coincide with progressive ideology,” Professor Sherrill says. “And this may be a shock to some people on the left.”

One of Mr. Adams’ first appointments was to name Keechant Sewell, chief of detectives in Nassau County, as the first Black woman to head the NYPD. And Mr. Adams has said he wants to bring more everyday New Yorkers into the police department, promoting those in what he calls the “minor leagues” of law enforcement, including hospital police, homeless service police, school safety officers, over 70% of whom are people of color and women.

Even though Mr. Adams has defended certain measures of “qualified immunity” and has spoke out forcefully against the “defund the police” movement, he has nevertheless been committed to reforming police departments. 

When he was 15, he and his brother were arrested and then assaulted by a New York police officer. The experience left him shaken and bitter, but the pastor at his church encouraged him and other young Black men to join the police department and work for change from within. In 1984, Mr. Adams graduated second in his class at the Police Academy. 

Indeed, over the course of his 22-year career as a New York police officer, Mr. Adams became a leader in efforts to change the NYPD from within, co-founding the advocacy group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, which focuses on police brutality and racial profiling. 

But he’s also focused on issues surrounding Black violence and high rates of homicide in certain communities. 

“Back then, when it was not a slogan painted on the streets, I was talking about Black Lives Matter,” Mr. Adams said in an interview in The Atlantic. “You can’t say ‘Black lives matter’ and have outrage when a police officer shoots someone ... but ignore shootings in our city the same day when 15 people are shot.”

In keeping with his emphasis on “emotional intelligence” over establishment credentials, the mayor-elect also tapped New York educator David Banks, who heads a network of all-boys schools that focus on students of color, to be chancellor of the nation’s largest school system. Mr. Banks founded the unionized Eagle Academy for Young Men in order to serve Black and Latino boys who often struggled in school, even as teachers – many of them white women – struggled to help them. 

In some ways, the mayor-elect’s choices represent a return to some of the emphasis in the Bloomberg administration, says Amy Zimmer, New York bureau chief at ChalkBeat, a nonprofit news organization that covers education issues across the country.

Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Banks have expressed support for charter schools – in stark contrast to the de Blasio administration, which imposed caps on the number of such nonunion schools. “Whether they make a push in Albany to lift the charter cap remains to be seen," says Ms. Zimmer, noting a change in leadership in the state legislature.

“But Adams has talked about replicating ‘excellent’ schools, and we just saw that Bloomberg Philanthropies is investing $750 million over the next five years to expand charter schools across the nation, including in New York City,” she says.

But the recent spike in crime and the city’s ongoing economic crisis remain New York’s most pressing problems, says Dan Biederman, president of Biederman Redevelopment Ventures Corp. in the city.

“Mayor Adams’ challenge is to turn that around,” says Mr. Biederman, citing the “changed views of the electorate” that brought him to power. “So far, he’s saying all the right things on this issue.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Biederman helped spark the revitalization of areas near Times Square, then a red-light district of sex shops and drug sales, creating organizations such as Bryant Park Corporation and 34th Street Partnership to form public and private partnerships that helped reshape these blighted areas into tourist destinations that brought billions to the city.

He’s still appalled at how progressive politicians and activists helped scuttle Amazon’s plans to possibly build its global headquarters in Queens, a move that would have brought thousands of jobs to the borough. Mr. Biederman says that one of Mayor-elect Adams’ biggest challenges will be to influence City Council members and state legislators to support his agenda, even as more progressives join their ranks.

“Companies like Amazon should be welcomed with open arms by his administration,” he says. “Despite being rejected for an HQ by legislators, they’ve stuck around in a less prominent way and have become a great force for good in this city.”

Like former Mayor Bloomberg, a former smoker who was also something of a health zealot, banning trans fats and famously failing to ban the sale of “big gulp”-sized sodas, Mayor-elect Adams has promised to revamp city-funded food programs. He wants to end processed school lunches, ban sugary drinks in public hospitals and city jails, and extol the benefits of plant-based eating. 

Dr. Tallaj, whose network serves the poorest of New Yorkers and has been on the front lines of the pandemic, has been helping shape the health policies of the incoming administration. But he also sees the larger challenges the city is facing. 

“I was just telling the [transition] group today,” he says. “In my country, Dominican Republic, when somebody says ... ‘I got a visa!’ it means, ‘I’m going to New York!’ 

“Now I say, ‘Oh, where are you going?’ To Austin, to Miami,” Dr. Tallaj continues. “I believe we have to go on that path to be sure that New York continues being the capital of the world. And I believe the mayor has his heart in doing so.”