What to know about Brad Lander

By Gabe Friedman

City Comptroller and longtime Park Slope resident Brad Lander announced Tuesday that he is running for mayor, challenging fellow Democrat Eric Adams. Lander, a well-known progressive, is the first Democrat to jump in the ring and take a rare shot at the incumbent. In a campaign launch video, he lambasted Mayor Adams, saying: “Nothing can replace New York City. But we can replace a leader when they fail the basic tests of the job.”

So what do you want to know?

Brad Lander in 2023 (Photo by the MTA, CC BY 2.0)

Well, first off, what’s a comptroller? Sounds like something a toddler would say when asking for the remote.
We hear you. But the comptroller is a very real position and one of the most prominent elected offices in the city. The job is akin to the chief financial officer role at a large corporation — overseeing audits of every single city agency (there are many) and scrutinizing the mayor’s overall city budget.

How does one grow up to be the comptroller?
By rising through the bureaucratic jungle of New York politics in any number of ways.

In Lander’s case, he grew up in a suburb of St. Louis; earned degrees from the University of Chicago, University College London and the Pratt Institute (in Clinton Hill); became the director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a nonprofit in Park Slope that manages affordable housing; and then helped lead the Pratt Center for Community Development.

He was elected to New York’s City Council in 2010, representing the 39th district, which includes neighborhoods such as Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Gowanus. He served in that seat until 2021, when he was elected comptroller.

So what are his policies?
Lander, 55, has made a name as one of the most progressive politicians in New York, earning a sizable profile and the allyship of peers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and even Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Lander’s cornerstone issues include affordable housing and workers’ rights. His city website boasts that as a Councilmember, he worked to “expand workers’ rights, secure tenant protections, create affordable housing, integrate and strengthen the district’s public schools, and make streets safer.” The campaign video from Tuesday emphasizes quality of life topics, such as work hours and rent prices. (You can search through his thousands of Council votes and proposed resolutions and laws here.)

He is also notably a liberal Zionist — a political group that gets smaller by the year — who strongly opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. He has often shown up at protests calling for both the return of Israeli hostages captured on Oct. 7 and for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza. It’s a position that puts him at odds with the staunchly pro-Israel Adams and a large contingent of New York’s Jewish establishment. (Lander himself is also Jewish.)

Any skeletons in his closet?
He’s been arrested multiple times at protests, including one at a car wash where workers were striking. He also took heat in 2016 for calling supporters of Yungman Lee — who was challenging longtime New York Rep. Nydia Velasquez in a primary — “scumbags.” Critics thought the term carried some racial connotations.

And as the New York Post pointed out earlier this week, he’s a “blatant traffic scofflaw,” having racked up an incredible 133 traffic violations since 2013.

Isn’t it rare to run against an incumbent in your own party for a seat as big as this?
Yes.

So why is he running against a fellow Democrat?
To put it mildly, he and Eric Adams don’t like each other.

Say more.
Eric Adams, a former policeman and Brooklyn borough president, has been one of the city’s most polarizing mayors in recent memory, puzzling many Democrats with his moderate-to-conservative policies on issues ranging from policing to housing to budget cuts. He has also courted corruption allegations tied to campaign contributions from Turkish businessmen.

So Adams was ripe for a challenge from progressives, who have loathed his substance and style. Lander, a founder of the Progressive Caucus in the City Council, is just the first in the race so far to represent the progressive case against Adams.

So does he have a legit chance?
It’s a little too early to tell how the chips will fall, but it’s safe to say that Lander has the profile to make a substantial run. But he has also reportedly opened the floodgates, as several other contenders — including Zellnor Myrie, the State Senator whose district overlaps with some of Lander’s district — are exploring runs.

Comptrollers also have a record worse than the Mets or the Knicks — they’re always in the running but haven’t won since 1973.

When is this all going down?
The Democratic mayoral primary will be June 2025, with the general election in November.

But whoever wins the Democratic primary will likely win election. Only four Republicans have been elected mayor of New Yawk in the past 100 years (and one of them, Michael Bloomberg, left the party).