Brad Lander (A.B. ’91) is running for the Democratic nomination in the New York City mayoral race this year. Courtesy of Lander for Mayor.

On June 24, 2025, New Yorkers will vote in an open primary for their mayor, with nine Democrats challenging embattled incumbent Eric Adams. Brad Lander (A.B. ’91), the current comptroller of New York City, has been a vocal critic of Adams since 2021 and is among the more progressive Democratic primary candidates.

Lander spoke with the Maroon about his studies at the University and his New York City mayoral campaign.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Chicago Maroon: Were you involved in any political activism during your studies at the University of Chicago?

Brad Lander: A lot of my career, both in affordable housing and community development and in politics, got its start at the University of Chicago. I was very active in community development and affordable housing work on the South Side. I helped create a student group called “Partners in Community Development” that worked with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Centers for New Horizons, and The Woodlawn Organization, trying to help fix up public housing [because] at the time those neighborhoods had seen tons of abandonments. That’s really what launched me into a career in affordable housing and community development, which is then what took me into the city government.

I was also active with a Chicago organization called the Jewish Council in Urban Affairs (JCUA), and a lot of the folks involved in JCUA had been part of the [former Chicago Mayor] Harold Washington administration. He died when I was a first-year in the College, [but] there had been a lot of energy behind his campaign and the coalition he built, and I was really inspired by that.

Unfortunately, his death demobilized that movement, and the funniest thing is that I actually worked on a local Board of [Aldermen] race for a guy who I’m pretty sure was an alum of the College, or at least in the University somewhere, and was representing Hyde Park. His name is Larry Bloom, and we all thought he was squeaky clean—one of the reformers fighting the boss, [former Chicago Mayor Richard] Daley, and fighting the machine—except that then a few years later, it turned out [Bloom] was corrupt, and he went to prison.

CM: I noticed you majored in Fundamentals at UChicago. What was your question?

BL: My question was, “What is a person?” with the relevance of that question for politics. Like, how do we think about what a person deserves in the sense of human rights and dignity, and what is a person capable of in terms of contributing to democratic decision-making and the polity?

I’ll see if I can remember my books. They were Plato’s Crito, Antigone—Greek was [a] language which I could read then but cannot now—[Tocqueville’s] Democracy in America, Rousseau’s Second Discourse, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, and Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus.

CM: As comptroller, you challenged Mayor Adams’s attempt to reduce funding for city public schools. What are the main threats to K-12 and higher education today, and how do you plan to address them?

BL: Unfortunately, Donald Trump and the MAGA federal government is the biggest threat to New York City’s budget in general, including our public schools. The ways that they’re defunding the Department of Education risks student loan funding [and] risks direct funding to [the City University of New York] and New York City public schools. [New York City public schools] have about a $30 billion budget, of which about $2 billion is federal funding, so it’s not the majority, but $2 billion is a lot of money.

Trump is shredding things in every direction, but he certainly has made clear his intent to come for cities like Chicago and New York that have sanctuary city policies and stand up for immigrant families. As mayor, we’re not going to let ICE into our schools or our hospitals or our shelters.

I am proposing a set of policies. We have a report coming out Wednesday [April 16] looking at the impact on the New York City budget of the tariffs, which unfortunately have a very real chance of leading to at least a mild and possibly a more serious recession, which would hit the city’s revenues.

Luckily, we had a pretty good year this year, so I’m proposing a big increase to our reserves from this year’s budget so that we’ll have a reserve next year both against cuts that Trump might make and against revenue shortfalls that could come from a tariff-induced recession.

CM: How can cities such as New York defend the rights of workers, immigrants, and vulnerable populations despite the current presidential administration’s aggressive policies towards those groups?

BL: Let me give an example of each. Most American workers are what’s called “at-will employees”.… If you’re an employer, you don’t have to give a reason, you could just fire someone. You’re not allowed to fire them for bad reasons—you can’t fire them because of their race—but you can just fire them without cause. It’s not like that in most of the world. In most of the world, even if you’re not in a union, you have what are called “just cause” or “good cause” employment protections. There’s got to be a reason to fire you.

We did that in New York City for fast food workers. I’m proposing that we pass that law for all New York City workers [so] that there has to be a reason to fire you. When you organize a union, if the boss fires you for organizing a union, that’s illegal, and your recourse is to go file an unfair labor practice with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), but that’s going to be useless during the Trump administration. If New York City passes this just cause employment law to end at-will employment here, then we can protect workers when they organize a union and get them their jobs back, even if Trump’s NLRB is toothless.

For reproductive rights and gender-affirming care, right now, New York City Health and Hospitals (H+H), the city-run health authority with 11 public hospitals and a lot of clinics, provides abortions and gender-affirming care. H+H has about a $4 billion budget; about $1 billion of that comes from the federal government. The abortions and gender-affirming care are less than $100 million, and I’m worried that at some point they’re gonna say, “Well if you do that, we’re going to stop giving you the billion dollars.” So my plan is to create an independent authority funded by city, state, and private dollars that will do the abortions and contraception and gender-affirming care, and then we can protect the billion we get from the federal government because H+H won’t be doing those things; they will be done by the independent authority.

So there’s some creative strategies, and then there’s just standing up to bullies and for our sanctuary city laws. If somebody has been convicted of a serious violent offense, then the city by law cooperates with ICE, but otherwise ICE is not welcome in our schools or jails or public hospitals or shelters, and I will enforce that law and work together with other cities so that we have strategies for going into court together and standing up together.

CM: Have you adjusted your political strategy in light of New York’s shift to the right this past presidential election? How can New York Democrats win over these voters?

BL: I’ve said on the campaign trail a bunch of times that I think progressives, myself included, were slow to reckon with the rising sense of disorder coming out of the pandemic and that it’s important to address that.

I’ve made the number one issue in my campaign ending street homelessness for people with serious mental illness in New York City. We don’t have to be a city where a couple thousand of our mentally ill neighbors sleep on the subway platforms and the stoops of our buildings, a danger to themselves, obviously in a condition that no one wants to live, and sometimes a danger to others.

There have been several very high-profile incidents: people getting pushed onto the subway tracks, one woman getting set on fire. We can end that and use this policy called “Housing First” that cities like Houston and Denver and Salt Lake City are using very effectively. They get people off the street and into housing with services, and then we’ll have a safer city and a more humane one. When I talk to voters about that, regardless of who they voted for for president or how they think about themselves ideologically, everybody I talk to wants to live in a city with fewer mentally ill people sleeping on the streets and subways.

I’m working hard to run a campaign that shows people we’ll really deliver on what matters to them: the sky-high cost of living, housing and childcare, [and] feeling safe in their neighborhoods. I think part of the reason why some New Yorkers shifted to voting for Trump is [they’re] just fed up with [a] government that [they don’t] feel like is actually fighting hard for them and delivering for them. I have a track record of making government work for people, actually preserving and creating affordable housing, really making neighborhoods safer, helping workers have better jobs, desegregating our public schools, and helping them run better, and that’s what I’m running on.

CM: What is the best way for progressive candidates like yourself and others to defeat Andrew Cuomo and other establishment candidates in general?

BL: You get out there and talk to everyone, which is what’s great about New York City. It’s just like this incredibly diverse city. It’s fun to be in every corner of it, talking to people. Cuomo’s got a long history not just as an establishment candidate but as an abusive and corrupt person, you know, with this long [history of] sexual harassment—we thought it was 13 women, but then the former mayor of Syracuse last week added her name to the list of someone whom he abused and forcibly kissed.

During the pandemic, he sent thousands of seniors to their deaths in nursing homes and then lied about it and was shown by Congress to have personally edited a Department of Health report to lie about and undercount the number of COVID deaths. There’s a new audit out; during the pandemic, he overruled the [state] Health Department that historically bought all the health equipment and centralized the purchasing under his own office, spent half a billion dollars purchasing 250,000 pieces of medical equipment and literally only three of them ever made it out to help New Yorkers. The other [249,997] are still rotting in warehouses. It’s a time of a lot of distraction because Trump has people pretty distracted, but I think when people really look at Andrew Cuomo’s terrible record and abusive personality, New Yorkers will realize he is not what we want for mayor.

CM: What do you think were the major lessons from the pandemic in New York about how we can respond adequately to future public health crises?

BL: This is such a hard question because I think what we need is an effective public health infrastructure that people trust, and one thing the pandemic did was weaken trust in that infrastructure. I would point people to—here I’ll be very “UChicagoan”—David Wallace-Wells, [who] has had some really good articles recently, kind of at the five-year anniversary, on pandemic lessons.

There is a great book by Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in Hell about the ways in which disasters can bring out solidarity in people. We saw that here after Superstorm Sandy. When you get walloped by a disaster and the neighbors really show up for each other, you get a kind of communal feeling that you want to protect your neighbor and help them even if they’re very different from you ideologically or politically or demographically. Unfortunately, the pandemic is not the only reason we have polarized politics and an attention deficit and a big lack of trust, but it has really contributed to that.

I think what we have to do—this kind of comes back to the campaign I’m running—is have bold and ambitious ideas for things that will really deliver for people. That’s why I’m focusing on housing and public safety and ending street homelessness and expanding childcare—practical things that matter in people’s lives—and then actually going to deliver them and govern the city more effectively with some small steps.

Rebuilding trust by having government deliver on things that matter to people, I think, is what we’re charged to do, both coming out of the pandemic and given the real crisis of democracy that Trump reveals and is exacerbating.