Child Care
Climate
Education
An Economy That Works for All
Fighting for Our Democracy
Government That Works
Health Care
Housing
Immigration
Public Safety
Public Transit & Safe Streets

Raising two public school kids in Brooklyn with his wife, Brad learned firsthand how the cost of child care and lack of parental leave made it nearly impossible for a family to make it in NYC. That’s why as a council member, Brad and a coalition of labor and community groups pushed the State to create one of the strongest paid family leave policies in the country and helped lead the fight to create Pre-K and 3-K for All in New York City. As Comptroller, he fought side by side with families against Mayor Adams’s misguided cuts to child care, and with child care educators for fair wages.

Brad knows that caring for our children — whether we choose to do it ourselves or share the responsibility with family or child care educator — is not only one of the most rewarding (and difficult) parts of our lives, but along with housing, one of the expenses that pushes families out of the city. As a longtime champion for child care educators, he knows that they do one of the hardest and most important jobs in our city, but are paid just above minimum wage. That’s why as mayor, Brad will:

• Immediately restore Mayor Adams’s cuts to child care, including the planning and outreach necessary to offer families seats in the communities where they live or work, so that NYC can achieve the commitment to universal Pre-K and 3K;

• Work toward universally available after-school programs for elementary and middle-school students, to support working families and provide time for programming that supports student wellbeing, health, and broader education;

• Make sure that the employer of every eligible parent or caregiver actually offers them the leave they are entitled to;

• Lead the fight at the state and national levels for the resources we need to provide free, full-day, high-quality child care for all and to pay child care educators the wages they deserve. Back to Issues Index

The climate crisis is not just coming — it’s already here. New York City must do more to lead the transition to renewable energy and to keep New Yorkers safe from rising tides and temperatures. Brad will make sure we do. While some politicians ignore the warning signs, or court Big Oil to pad their campaign coffers with corporate cash, Brad has confronted the climate crisis head-on. 

As a member of the City Council, Brad helped pass NYC’s pioneering “80 x 50” (80% fossil fuel reductions by 2050) and was an early supporter of NYC’s “Dirty Buildings” law to cut large building emissions by 40% by 2030 and to zero by 2050. Brad led the successful decade-long fight to ban plastic bags and was instrumental in the city’s Styrofoam ban.

As Comptroller, Brad led the New York City public pension funds in developing and adopting the most ambitious plan in the country to reach net zero emissions by 2040. Brad has engaged actively with portfolio companies toward this goal through proxy voting and shareholder initiatives, recently pushing major banks including Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Royal Bank of Canada to agree to disclose their fossil fuel versus clean energy funding ratios, a critical step toward decarbonization.

Brad is currently spearheading Public Solar NYC, a “public option” that recently secured millions in federal climate funding to expand rooftop solar and make renewable energy accessible to all New Yorkers. As mayor, Brad will dramatically accelerate investments in solar, offshore wind, electric vehicles, safe battery storage, and other climate solutions that create good, green jobs and enable New Yorkers of all backgrounds to participate in the transition to a sustainable economy.

Brad will also lead the way to a city that is far more prepared for climate emergencies. His investigations into the Adams Administration’s lack of preparedness for extreme rainfall, coastal storms, and extreme heat document the steps we must take — but are currently failing to. Brad has helped improve the City’s infrastructure planning and capital projects management so it can deliver the projects that will protect New Yorkers on time and on budget. From his decades of experience in the community development movement, and his experience leading communities after Superstorm Sandy, he knows how to lead the large-scale mobilization of “social infrastructure,” of neighbors working together in the face of adversity, that will be necessary to protect New Yorkers in the storms to come. Back to Issues Index

As we move forward from pandemic disruptions into a future full of both uncertainty and new possibilities, New York City needs a stronger vision and leadership to ensure a thriving and inclusive economy — where diverse entrepreneurs can create and grow businesses with confidence; where workers have good jobs that offer fair wages, safe working conditions, and real career paths; and with vibrant neighborhoods across the five boroughs offering all New Yorkers access to services, culture, and community. Brad has the track record and experience to provide that vision and leadership.

Brad’s work in community development in the 1990s and 2000s, as the executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee and the Pratt Center for Community Development, and the board chair of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, helped bring New York City back from the era of abandonment. Brad learned how to revitalize neighborhoods, support small businesses, finance housing and economic development, and create job training programs that have helped over 5,000 New Yorkers get good jobs and access to stable career paths.

In the City Council, he passed a broad array of legislation to help working New Yorkers — from fast-food workers to freelancers — win good jobs and living wages:

• His “fair work week” legislation ended cruel and erratic scheduling for fast-food and retail workers, giving them advance notice of their schedules, and a pathway to full-time work.

• His “just cause” legislation ended arbitrary firings in the fast-food industry, and provided a model for job stability that New York City can build upon.

• He passed the first law in the country to guarantee a living wage for Uber, Lyft, and other for-hire drivers, putting more than $500 million in the pockets of drivers rather than Uber and Lyft’s bank accounts — without disruption to customers or a loss of service. 

• He introduced and passed the first law in the country requiring minimum pay for deliveristas working for DoorDash, Grubhub, Seamless, Uber Eats, and other food service apps — and fought successfully to preserve the law when lobbyists sought to undercut it at City Hall and quash it in the courts.

• Brad worked with the Freelancers Union to create and pass the “Freelance Isn’t Free Act,” which gives groundbreaking protections to independent contractors to ensure they are paid on time and in full, and hundreds of freelancers have now recovered millions of dollars they were owed. He also passed a law extending the benefits of New York City’s Human Rights Law to freelancers and independent contractors, ensuring that they are protected from discrimination and harassment in the workplace. 

As Comptroller, Brad has continued to ensure a thriving and inclusive economy. His Bureau of Public Finance has continued New York City’s strong municipal finance practice, generating over $24.4 billion for investments in the City’s streets, sewers, schools, parks, and housing that have created tens of thousands of jobs and public realm improvements in neighborhoods across the city.

His economic newsletters and reports have consistently shined a spotlight on key economic issues, bringing data, analysis and recommendations to the challenges our city is facing: remote work and its impact on commercial real estate, the tech sector, effective use of City tax breaks for economic development, income tax trends, the city’s housing supply challenge, retail and consumer services, care work, the impact of minimum wage increases, the racial wealth gap in New York, M/WBE procurement, disability and employment in NYC, and property tax reform and assessment issues.

As investment advisor to the five New York City pension funds, he has overseen a wide array of investments delivering strong returns for the City’s $270+ billion portfolio, while consistently leading efforts to ensure that companies with whom New York City invests treat their workers with dignity and respect and allow their workers to join a union without interference. His landmark shareholder proposal at Starbucks required an independent assessment of its labor practices and helped lead to a groundbreaking national agreement between the company and the union representing workers across the country. 

As a pension trustee, Brad led a working group that developed a thoughtfully tailored policy that provided long-term disability support to police officers, firefighters, and other first responders who contracted Long Covid early in the pandemic and were no longer able to work.

Brad rebuilt the Bureau of Labor Law and expanded the work the Comptroller’s office does on behalf of workers within New York City and around the world. He established prevailing wage rates for Staten Island Ferry workers, ending a multi-year legal dispute between hundreds of Ferry workers and New York City, leading to over $30 million dollars in backpay for those essential workers. He has also recovered more than $8 million in back wages and civil penalties for New York City’s prevailing wage workers including construction workers, temp workers, building service workers, and security officers.

Brad is a consistent presence for workers on the picket line fighting for rights, wages, and dignity in workplaces across New York, standing in solidarity with nurses, auto workers, legal services workers, building service workers, UPS workers, guild workers at the New York Times and Harper Collins, screen actors, writers, and more. Back to Issues Index

The son of a public school guidance counselor, a K-12 public school graduate himself, and the father of two NYC public school graduates, Brad knows that our city’s public schools are central to our families’ and our city’s future. This is a critical moment to chart a future course for public education that ensures that every student loves learning, stays healthy, and has the opportunity to become a leader in their community and our city. 

As Comptroller, Brad helped lead the successful fight against Eric Adams when he proposed to cut the budgets of 77% of the city’s public schools — as they were still reeling from the pandemic — and against his cuts to 3K, Pre-K, and CUNY. He identified comprehensive strategies to simultaneously better serve students with disabilities while saving hundreds of millions of dollars on due process claims.

In the City Council, Brad invested millions in his communities’ public schools. He led the campaign that secured air-conditioning in all NYC school classrooms, after working with students on a policy report showing that 25% of classrooms did not have A/C, making it #TooHotToLearn for students and teachers.

Brad believes that we should have excellent schools in every neighborhood. By denying some of our most talented, driven students the opportunities they deserve, segregation continues to hinder our progress toward that goal. Brad led the effort to enact the School Diversity Accountability Act, requiring the Department of Education to report annually on their plan to fight student demographics and pushing the Department of Education to produce a plan to confront school segregation and improve school quality. He worked closely with parents, students, and educators to adopt a bold integration plan for the middle schools of Brooklyn’s District 15, in the heart of his own district as a Council Member, that is showing encouraging signs of success. A recent report from the Comptroller’s office shows how inclusive school mergers can simultaneously reduce class sizes, advance integration, and improve student outcomes.

Coming out of a pandemic that rattled confidence in public schools, prompted an exodus of teachers, and accelerated a mental health crisis, New York City’s public schools need a powerful new vision that gives our students the tools and knowledge to make our city even greater. Our children need to be able to understand and debate the critical issues, and learn the technical skills to succeed.

We know what works: continued investment rather than cuts, a focus on enabling students to succeed in reading and STEM, a broader focus on relevant career and technical education, a comprehensive approach to student mental health, robust arts education, and civics education that helps all students contribute to our shared thriving. We need relentless, disciplined management and execution of those strategies.

As Mayor, Brad will restore Mayor Adams’s cuts to early childhood education and deliver on the city’s commitment to 3-K and Pre-K for All, making sure that families know all their options and are able to choose a program that meets their needs in the communities where they live or work. He will work toward universally available after-school programs, to support working families and provide time for programming that support student wellbeing, health, arts, sports, civics, financial literacy, life skills, and internships.

Under Brad’s leadership, public education will do more to help prepare our young people for success. Brad will expand career and technical education opportunities, like the successful STEAM Center in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. And he will be an unparalleled champion for the City University of New York, NYC’s most powerful springboard to the middle class. Brad will put forward a plan for municipal control, new funding sources, and an ambitious re-envisioning of CUNY, so it can help prepare the next generation of New York City’s teachers, health professionals, scientists, tech innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders of tomorrow. Back to Issues Index

Our democracy is in peril: most immediately from Donald Trump's lies, incitement, hate-mongering, and authoritarian Project 2025; and also from a longer-term decline in civic trust and participation. Brad is a long-time leader in the fight to protect, improve, and energize our democratic institutions.

As mayor, he will bring New Yorkers together to fight back against any authoritarian attempts to rip away the rights of women, LGBTQIA+, immigrants, people of color, Jews, Muslims, or any other New Yorkers. And he will revitalize New York City government with new tools for participation and partnership, in order to restore the trust and civic engagement that the future of our democracy depends on.

After the 2016 election, Brad co-founded Get Organized BK with Rabbi Rachel Timoner and emerging leaders, bringing thousands of Brooklynites together to stand up to bigotry, corruption, and the injustice of the Trump regime. Many of the spin-off organizations that emerged through Get Organized BK — Indivisible Brooklyn, BKForge (formerly WHARR), Red2Blue — have continued to organize in partnership with local and national organizations.

Brad has experience making “participatory democracy” a reality. As a council member, he helped bring participatory budgeting to NYC, giving hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers a new way to be a part of the process of designing community improvement projects and deciding how to invest public funds in their neighborhoods. Through a decade of community conversations and organizing, Brad led the Gowanus Neighborhood Rezoning to build toward a more affordable and sustainable city through investments in housing, sewer, transit, parks, and school infrastructure — the only major recent rezoning that won the overwhelming support of its local community board.

Brad is a champion for good government and transparency. He authored the Independent Expenditure Disclosure Act, giving NYC the most aggressive SuperPAC disclosure requirements in the country. He helped win reforms to NYC’s campaign finance system to make it more effective. He sponsored the legislation to bring Ranked Choice Voting to our city and led the successful advocacy efforts to make it happen — transforming our election system and increasing voter participation in our democracy. And Brad was proud to vote to include noncitizen New Yorkers in local democracy so that our neighbors can vote on leaders and decisions that shape the city we share. 

Now, more than ever, as the very foundations of our democracy are tested, Brad knows we must stand firm in our resolve to protect and strengthen it. Back to Issues Index

Brad is running to make NYC’s government work better — and truly get stuff done. To make sure we focus on the basics: keeping our streets clean, and our neighborhoods safe. To set clear goals and measure outcomes, so we can honestly assess whether or not we’re delivering on our promises. To demand and win reform of broken government systems, like the management of capital projects. To make smart uses of technology and innovation.

After bringing participatory budgeting to NYC as a council member, Brad was frustrated — like many New Yorkers — at the creeping pace of the City’s capital project construction. So he successfully championed Local Law 37 of 2020, which required the development of a user-friendly NYC Capital Projects Tracker and management tool to help get New York City’s schools, parks, bridges and roads built on time and on budget. As Comptroller he was a leading participant in the Capital Process Reform Taskforce, which successfully won legislative reforms in Albany to allow the City to build infrastructure faster, better, and cheaper.

Brad knows that we can’t manage what we don’t measure. So as Comptroller, he’s launched a series of dashboards to focus attention on critical issues. The office’s Homelessness dashboard measures the City’s efforts to prevent homelessness and help more people move from shelter into stable housing. The Department of Correction (DOC) dashboard was created because DOC was failing to provide basic public information on staffing, levels of violence, medical visits, and deaths in custody. The NYC Agency Staffing dashboard provides unprecedented transparency into staffing levels and vacancies City agencies.

To improve the City’s financial management, Brad has proposed a new Fiscal Framework for New York City. Nearly fifty years after the near-bankruptcy of the City during the fiscal crisis, Brad has proposed a set of actions that will ensure the City has sufficient reserves, achieve long-term savings without cutting vital services, maintain the affordability of the City’s debt, conduct realistic assessments of the City’s capital assets, and ensure timely registration and payment of the City’s contracts.

Lander leads by example, and has improved the functioning of the Comptroller’s office itself. Under his leadership, the Comptroller’s Bureau of Contract Administration has improved the processing of contracts, averaging just 19 days for contract registration of the over 10,000 contracts the office receives each year — 37% better than its required 30-day deadline, and dramatically better than Mayoral agencies charged with similar tasks. Under Brad’s stewardship, New York City public pension funds have grown to record levels, becoming the third-largest public pension system in the country, with a broad and diversified investment approach for the City’s $270+ billion pension portfolio to ensure the retirement security of nearly 800,000 current and future retired teachers, firefighters, and other city workers. Brad issued the City’s first social bonds — bonds that support projects with positive social and environmental outcomes — and he recently preserved over 35,000 affordable rental units with an investment of $60 million from the NYC Employee Retirement System.

Brad has a deep history of engaging New Yorkers to make government work better. He brought participatory budgeting to New York City in 2011, enabling hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to directly develop, shape, and fund projects in their neighborhoods. After Superstorm Sandy, he brought Brooklynites together to care for displaced neighbors and used those insights to help strengthen civic capacity for disaster response. He led the community planning effort that made the Gowanus Rezoning the largest area-wide rezoning to win community board support. As Comptroller, he established a NYCHA Resident Audit Committee to give NYCHA residents the ability to shape investigations, uncover data, and win real results.

Brad will bring the same dogged focus on results to the Mayor’s office. He will build a nimble government that makes sound investments and solves problems with integrity, efficiency, collaboration and transparency. He will hire the best talent to lead City agencies, and he will work with the municipal unions to modernize civil service laws that reflect the 21st-century workplace, making New York City a beacon for people who want to serve their neighbors. And he will continue to provide transparency about results on the issues that matter, including how he and his team are doing at keeping their promises. Back to Issues Index

All New Yorkers need quality, affordable health care that keeps them and their families safe without breaking the bank.

As Comptroller, Brad rejected the Adams Administration's effort to force city retirees onto inferior Medicare Advantage plans they did not want. Brad also stood with workers from 32BJ SEIU, DC37, and others to stand up against “surprise bills” and unaffordable hospital prices. He has worked with NYC Health + Hospital nurses, doctors, and administrators to help reduce vacancies and save money on outside contracts, so we can keep H+H a thriving health care system for New Yorkers. As a council member, he led the charge to extend NYC’s Paid Safe & Sick Leave law to more workers. And he passed a law prohibiting pharmacies from selling cigarettes, with a long-term goal to significantly reduce the overall number of stores that sell cigarettes.

Brad is a longtime champion for reproductive rights — an issue on which he’s learned most from his wife, Meg Barnette, who served as General Counsel and Chief Strategy Officer of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York for a decade. Brad will ensure that NYC remains a haven for reproductive health care, including contraception and abortion care, regardless of health insurance or income.

Brad knows that health coverage helps most when a New Yorker’s plan is low-cost — not saddled with high deductibles, high premiums, or restrictions as to where it can be used. He will fight to dramatically improve coverage for all New Yorkers with protections for our most vulnerable residents, including those with preexisting conditions, and expand the City’s efforts to eliminate crushing medical debt.

With New York City facing a mental health crisis, Brad will focus on evidence-based programs that make a real difference. His audit of the City’s Intensive Mobile Treatment exposed severe management deficiencies and outlined reforms. With investments in a continuum of care that includes better coordinated outreach, expanded inpatient hospital bed capacity, and expansion of proven “Housing First” programs, and with a relentless focus from City Hall, New York City could move to end street homelessness of mentally ill people — bringing health and safety for them and for the city. Brad will prohibit the use of smartphones in schools and expand proven mental health programs to confront the crisis facing our young people. Back to Issues Index

With decades of experience as an urban planner, nonprofit affordable housing developer and advocate, legislative leader on tenant rights, and champion of equitable growth and housing supply, there is no one more equipped to confront the City’s worsening housing affordability crisis than Brad.

Before he was elected to the City Council, Brad led two not-for-profit, affordable housing and community development corporations, where he built hundreds of affordable housing units and emerged as a leading housing policy expert. In the Council, Brad spearheaded and championed critical legislation to protect tenants from harassment and displacement, provide a right to legal counsel for tenants, create safe and legal basement apartments, and combat housing discrimination. 

Brad initiated, championed, and built broad community and political support for the Gowanus planning and rezoning process that will produce 8,500 new housing units, almost 3,000 of which will be affordable to low-income and working-class families, along with investments in open space, arts and industry, environmental remediation, stormwater protection, and NYCHA. Brad’s steadfast leadership in Gowanus — one of the only large-scale rezonings to have the overwhelming support of its local community board — is generating more new development than anywhere else in the City.

As Comptroller, Brad issued the City’s first social bonds, generating over $1 billion to finance over 7,000 new units of low-income housing. He initiated an investment in the acquisition of the loan portfolio of the failed Signature Bank that is preserving over 35,000 affordable rental units while yielding strong returns for the pension fund. He spearheaded the creation of “Responsible Property Management Standards” which are becoming a national standard for real estate investment funds with tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of units under management. And he helped the current Progressive Caucus launch its successful campaign to secure $2 billion in City capital for affordable housing, with a renewed focus on permanently affordable social housing, including community-controlled rental housing and affordable homeownership.

Brad understands what it will take to confront the City’s housing affordability crisis. In “Building Blocks of Change,” his team has outlined the steps necessary to upend bureaucratic dysfunction at the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and dramatically increase the pace of housing development. In audits of the City’s failing efforts to address street homelessness for people with severe mental illness, and a policy report on effective “Housing First” strategies, he has pointed the way to effectively end street homelessness of mentally ill New Yorkers. Together with New York State Assembly candidate Micah Lasher, he has proposed a new “Homes for City Workers” program to make homeownership possible for the City’s teachers, cops, and firefighters.

Brad will bring his decades of expertise and bold leadership to build more housing at a wide range of income levels, make sure that housing is affordable to working families, protect tenants from harassment and displacement, dramatically reduce unsheltered homelessness, and create new models that make homeownership possible for the next generation of New York’s families — so we can make this a city where every New Yorker has a stable, safe, and affordable place to call home. Back to Issues Index

For generations, immigration has been a key driver of New York City’s thriving economy, vibrant culture, and dynamic neighborhoods — to the benefit of all New Yorkers. It can play that role now and for the future, but only if our City government gets its act together.

As a City Council Member, Brad worked under the leadership of Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito to pass new policies protecting immigrants from deportation. He was also an early supporter of the effort to expand opportunities for street vendors and to create the New York City ID to help immigrants get access to financial, employment, and other services. He passed significant legislation to support immigrant workers and communities, including laws that protect and support Uber and Lyft drivers and other gig-workers, carwasheros, fast-food workers, and vulnerable tenants facing harassment and displacement. Brad has a long track record of partnering with immigrant advocates on issues like workers’ rights, housing affordability, and language justice.

As New York City has seen the arrival of over 150,000 people seeking asylum over the past two years, Brad has pushed for a common-sense management approach that uses City dollars more efficiently while setting new arrivals up for success. In July of 2023, Brad urged City agencies to keep prices down and improve services by replacing costly no-bid emergency contracts with vendors selected through a competitive bid process. In September 2023, he used his powers as Comptroller to reject the Adams Administration’s $432 million no-bid contract with DocGo, a for-profit medical staffing company with no experience providing shelter or services for asylum seekers, ultimately leading to its cancellation. His audit of Adams’ no-bid staffing contracts found millions wasted by agencies’ failure to utilize cost controls.

Lander’s hard-hitting investigation into the Adams Administration’s implementation of its 60-day shelter limit for asylum-seeking families revealed that City Hall has subjected over 37,000 people to repetitive screenings for shelter alternatives, disrupted families’ efforts to obtain work authorization and legal status, and uprooted children from the schools where they made connections.

Brad helped lead the effort to establish the successful Promise NYC program, which provides child care for families seeking asylum, so parents can go to work, and have a safe place for their kids (and don’t feel forced to bring their kids on the subway to sell candy). And despite their difference, Brad initiated an effort with Mayor Adams to partner with philanthropic foundations that has raised millions of dollars to support community-based efforts to help asylum seekers find work and get on their feet.

A better approach is possible: one that is more effective, more compassionate, and better for NYC economically. As mayor, Brad will build on the City’s Asylum Application Help Center and network of immigrant service providers — and on the example of Jewish Family Services of Western New York, who are taking over the DocGo contract — to make smart investments in legal services to help families apply for asylum and work authorization, along with case management, ESL, workforce development, and placement assistance to help them obtain jobs so they can move out of shelter. This will more effectively decrease the shelter population and save on sheltering costs via real supports, rather than by kicking people out of shelter on arbitrary timelines.

New York City's long history of immigration is a big part of what makes this city the best in the world. Brad is proud to help New York City continue this tradition of welcoming immigrants, helping them resettle, and viewing support to immigrants as an investment in our shared future — by providing the results-oriented management and better-functioning public systems that will connect people to employment and out of shelter. Back to Issues Index

All New Yorkers deserve safe neighborhoods. To ride the subway and walk home free from fear. A safe school for their kids. And a justice system that treats them fairly. It’s not too much to demand — our families and our future depend on it.

When he moved to New York in the early 90s — a time of peak abandonment and violence — Brad immediately rolled up his sleeves as the executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, implementing community development strategies to bring neighbors together to fight blight, connect at-risk youth to jobs, restore abandoned buildings to vitality and provide safe housing, and support small businesses impacted directly by rising crime.

Coming out of the pandemic, we face new public safety challenges. Even with crime well below historic highs from the 80s and 90s, New Yorkers don’t feel safe and secure, with just 22% of New Yorkers feeling safe riding the subway at night (compared to 46% in 2017). Brad will attack this sense of insecurity head-on by confronting the City’s failure to address and confront record-high homelessness, a growing mental health crisis, persistent gun violence, a serious spike in drug overdoses, rampant retail theft, thousands of illegal weed shops, rising hate crimes, and traffic deaths and serious injuries on our streets. 

Brad will appoint new NYPD leadership to strengthen the department’s management, focus on violence reduction efforts and solving gun crimes, utilize data honestly and in partnership with communities to reduce crime, improve officer training and support, insist on real accountability, and rebuild police-community relations to make NYC’s policing fairer and more effective. He will transform the NYPD’s handling of sexual assault and domestic abuse to give survivors the privacy, respect, safety and support they deserve.

Police are critical to prevent and respond to violence, get illegal guns off the streets, and solve crimes. But policing, harsh sentences, and mass incarceration can’t address mental health or drug addiction, help people get good jobs at living wages, or keep kids from skipping school. So Brad will take a broader approach to achieving safety in communities that brings together policing, community-based violence prevention and alternatives, mental health and substance abuse, and the City’s broader social safety net — programs that we’re already paying for — in a better coordinated, data-driven partnership. He’ll do the same to combat surging hate crimes, to make sure that Jewish, Muslim, Black, Asian, Hispanic, LGBTQIA+, and all New Yorkers are free to worship, work, and walk down the street free from fear.

As Comptroller, Brad’s hard-hitting audits and reports have exposed the failures of this administration’s window-dressing approach to public safety: The Adams’ administration’s sweeps of homeless encampment sites placed 0.1% of the folks they removed into permanent housing, with roughly a third of the homeless encampments cropping back up less than a year later. Fewer than a third of participants in the City’s Intensive Mobile Treatment (IMT) program to support people with severe mental illness are taking their prescribed medication. Brad will implement an effective, comprehensive public safety and continuum-of-care strategy that will actually succeed in helping people get and stay off the street and subway, and effectively end street homelessness of mentally ill people in New York City, now at a two-decade high.

Illegal weed shops have become a menace in neighborhoods all across the city; Brad will deploy tools newly granted to the City by the State and focus aggressively and transparently on cracking down on them. He will confront retail theft and violence against workers with proven strategies for deterrence and intervention that protect workers and small businesses’ bottom line. And he will rein in reckless driving — in cars and on mopeds — that is causing the highest levels of deaths and serious injuries from traffic crashes in a decade.

All of that can and must be done with justice and fairness, without racial bias or discrimination, with transparency and accountability. That’s why at the height of the discriminatory use of stop-and-frisk Brad spearheaded legislation at the City Council along with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to strengthen the city’s prohibition on racial profiling and create the office of the NYPD Inspector General. What followed were dramatic declines in discriminatory stop-and-frisk, accompanied by dramatic declines in crime. Brad will insist on genuine accountability, at every level from the mayor down, so that New York City can be a city with safety and justice for all. Back to Issues Index

Brad has been a champion for public transit and safe streets — high-quality, accessible, and affordable subways and buses, a safe and vibrant public realm that enhances economic and community vitality, and safer streets with fewer preventable deaths — for over two decades.

Following a devastating crash outside Brad’s City Council district office that killed two small children, he relentlessly spearheaded the passage of the Reckless Driver Accountability Act, which takes an evidence-backed, restorative justice approach to changing driver behavior and holding reckless drivers accountable. As a Council member, he advocated successfully for dozens of projects to make streets and intersections safer, created new pedestrian plazas, and utilized an innovative approach to participatory budgeting to win a long-overdue elevator for the 7th Avenue F/G station in his district. As Comptroller, Brad has released hard-hitting audits and reports that have had a real impact: driving more effective enforcement of scofflaw drivers and “ghost” plates, improving Citi Bike service and oversight of the City’s Ferry system, and driving City agencies’ efforts to reduce crash claims.

Now, Brad is leading the charge to implement Congestion Pricing to reduce traffic and carbon emissions, create safer streets, and fund critical service and accessibility improvements for the subway system that serves as the lifeblood of New York City.

Brad’s bold vision and unwavering leadership will confront new transportation challenges — like the rapid rise of mopeds that are wreaking havoc on our streets and sidewalks — and meet the moment with innovative design and first-in-class infrastructure, and a targeted, problem-solving approach to holding reckless drivers, and the companies who employ them, accountable.

He’ll continue to champion congestion pricing to fund critical investments in our public transit system, using the nearly 20% expected reduction in traffic to transform New York City streets, dramatically expand pedestrian plazas, and improve bike and bus lane infrastructure. And he will bring his aggressive focus on improving capital projects management and procurement reform to make sure transit and transportation projects are completed on time and on budget — so we can create the safe, vibrant, and accessible streetscape and transit system that New Yorkers deserve. Back to Issues Index