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      Maya Wiley Lands Major Endorsement From Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

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      Mr. Jeffries, New York’s top House Democrat, said he intended to engage in significant efforts on Ms. Wiley’s behalf, including making campaign appearances with her.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the state’s highest-ranking House Democrat, is throwing his support to Maya D. Wiley in the race for mayor of New York City, a significant endorsement at a critical juncture in the race.The decision by Mr. Jeffries, who is the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens, comes at an inflection point both for Ms. Wiley and in the volatile race more broadly, nearly five weeks before the June 22 primary that is likely to decide the next mayor.“This is a change election, and Maya Wiley is a change candidate,” Mr. Jeffries, who could become the first Black House speaker, said in an interview on Saturday afternoon. Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, is fresh off an assertive debate performance in which she repeatedly sought to put Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, on the defensive. Mr. Adams and Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, have generally been regarded as the two leading contenders, with Ms. Wiley trailing in the sparse public polling available.Still, she has acquired a number of notable endorsements, including the backing of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union. An endorsement from Mr. Jeffries, coupled with her debate performance and the start of her advertising campaign, may bolster her efforts to introduce herself to voters and to gain steam in the final weeks before the primary.“Maya’s life experiences, if she can get out and tell that story, will be particularly compelling,” Mr. Jeffries said. “An African-American woman who lost her father at a very young age but rallied back from that adversity to follow in her father’s footsteps as a civil rights champion is a quintessential change candidate.”Mr. Jeffries is expected to appear with Ms. Wiley on Sunday at Restoration Plaza in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He said he intended to engage in significant efforts on her behalf, with hopes to campaign with Ms. Wiley as well as with Representatives Yvette Clarke and Nydia Velázquez, who have also endorsed her candidacy. Notably, those three lawmakers, who all represent slices of Brooklyn, did not side with Mr. Adams, a fellow elected official and a veteran of the borough’s politics. Their endorsements of Ms. Wiley may be seen as blows to Mr. Adams as he seeks to consolidate his own support. Mr. Adams and Mr. Jeffries have found themselves on opposing sides of a number of political battles over the years.Asked about some of those dynamics, Mr. Jeffries said that “my respect and relationship with Eric Adams at the present moment is a strong one, and I wish him the very best.”Ms. Wiley, one of the more left-leaning candidates in the race, said she had heard from Mr. Jeffries on Friday night, adding that he, along with Ms. Clarke and Ms. Velázquez, were “leaders whose constituents trust them, respect them, and they move votes.”“To have Hakeem Jeffries standing up with me saying, ‘This is my candidate,’ is hugely impactful in a critically important part of this city to win for anyone who wants to be mayor of New York City,” she added.In the June primary, New Yorkers will be able to rank up to five mayoral candidates, and Mr. Jeffries indicated that he might reveal other rankings of his choices for mayor but said he had not yet reached a decision on how he would proceed.In the interview, he sketched out a detailed map of what he saw as Ms. Wiley’s path to victory, though certainly, with a crowded field of candidates, there is significant competition for every major political constituency in New York.“I expect that Eric Adams and Maya Wiley will perform the best in the communities of central Brooklyn, as well as in other traditionally African-American neighborhoods throughout the city of New York,” Mr. Jeffries said, going on to note Ms. Wiley’s potential in “both traditionally African-American communities” and parts of the city that are home to many white liberals, mentioning neighborhoods like Chelsea, in Manhattan, and progressive Brooklyn enclaves. “That’s a pretty powerful electoral pathway, if the campaign can continue to put it together over the next few weeks,” he said.Some rival Democrats have feared the prospect of a late surge from Ms. Wiley, and the coming weeks will test her ability to execute on that possibility.“Every day I will be out to speak, and we will be making sure that our message is getting out both on television and on radio,” she said. “People are starting to turn their attention to this race in earnest and we’re going to make sure they know who I am and what I stand for and what I’m going to do.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Jeffries said that at a policy level, he was drawn to Ms. Wiley’s promises to lead an equitable economic recovery coming out of the pandemic. Ms. Wiley, a civil rights lawyer, speaks often of “reimagining” New York, a city marked by significant racial and economic inequality.“Those communities who have been hurt the most in terms of an economic crisis have often been helped the least,” Mr. Jeffries said. “Those communities that have been hurt the least have often been helped the most. It seems to me that Maya Wiley is the person to make sure that this time will be different.”In recent weeks, issues of violent crime have moved to the forefront of the mayor’s race, amid a significant spike in shootings and a number of high-profile attacks in the subways. Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang have been especially direct about the role they believe the police can play in restoring calm, even as they also support combating police misconduct.Ms. Wiley released a plan to combat gun violence months ago. But she has also supported reallocating $1 billion from the New York Police Department’s funding “to fund investments in alternatives to policing,” her campaign said. And she has resisted the idea of adding more police officers to patrol the subways, breaking with the two perceived front-runners during the debate on that issue as she emphasized the importance instead of empowering mental health professionals.The next mayor, Mr. Jeffries said, must strike “the right balance between promoting public safety and promoting fairness and justice in policing.”“It seems to me that Maya Wiley gets that we have to do both,” he said. Mr. Jeffries said he had reached his decision after extensive conversations with candidates, others in the New York congressional delegation and constituents.His mother did not wait to see where her son would land, telling Ms. Wiley weeks ago that she was on board, NY1 reported.“My mom totally got out ahead of me on that one,” Mr. Jeffries said. “Far be it from me to break publicly from my mom.” More

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      It’s a Home in Brooklyn. What Could It Cost? $100,000?

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      Shaun Donovan and Raymond J. McGuire, candidates for mayor of New York, were way, way off when asked to estimate the median home price in the borough.Do you know the median sales price for a home in Brooklyn?The question, which was recently posed to eight mayoral candidates by The New York Times editorial board, was not a trick. Brooklyn is a notoriously expensive borough in one of America’s most expensive cities, and New York City’s housing crisis promises to be a major issue in the coming years.Yet the range of responses given by two of the candidates — off by roughly an order of magnitude — has touched off incredulity among New Yorkers.“In Brooklyn, huh? I don’t for sure,” Shaun Donovan, who has touted his experience as housing secretary under President Barack Obama and housing commissioner under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, answered. “I would guess it is around $100,000.”The guess from Raymond J. McGuire, an investment banker and former executive at Citigroup who has sought to woo voters with his financial acumen, included similar numbers.“It’s got to be somewhere in the $80,000 to $90,000 range, if not higher,” he said.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, said he believed the number was about $550,000. Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, guessed $1.8 million. Only Andrew Yang, who has been criticized in the past for seeming out of touch with the city’s issues, guessed correctly: $900,000.Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, guessed $800,000; Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, $500,000; and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, $1 million.While Mr. Donovan and Mr. McGuire are not considered among the leading candidates in the race, it was their answers that drew the most attention, with many people suggesting that they did not have a grasp on the problems of working people. As several people pointed out on social media, among the things that can be purchased in Brooklyn for $100,000 or less, according to the website Zillow: a parking space and two vacant lots.“It’s hard to imagine these men solving a problem they don’t know exists,” said Monica Klein, a political consultant. The Working Families Party, which has endorsed two other candidates, Ms. Morales and Ms. Wiley, is a client of Ms. Klein’s firm, Seneca Strategies.“If you don’t spend your days refreshing StreetEasy and obsessing over apartments you will never afford, are you really a New Yorker?” Ms. Klein askedAccording to a note appended to a transcript of the editorial board’s interview with Mr. Donovan, he had sent an email several hours after the interview to say that his $100,000 answer referred to the assessed value of homes in Brooklyn, which tends to be much lower than their selling price.“I really don’t think you can buy a house in Brooklyn today for that little,” he wrote, according to the transcript.Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for Mr. Donovan, said Tuesday that Mr. Donovan “misinterpreted the question and made a mistake.”“He had been volunteering on a complex housing assessment lawsuit and just got the numbers mixed up,” Mr. Edwards said. “As Shaun says, he is a housing nerd and public servant who has dedicated 30 years of his life to solving the problems of housing affordability and homelessness, and the wrong number slipped out.”[Read the transcript of Mr. Donovan’s interview with the editorial board.]In an emailed response on Tuesday, Mr. McGuire said he “messed up when accounting for the cost of housing in Brooklyn.”“I am human,” he said. “But make no mistake, I care deeply about our city’s affordable housing crisis. I know what it’s like not being able to afford a home because it was my own experience. At the heart of my housing plan, which addresses the entire housing spectrum from homelessness to homeownership, are New Yorkers who want leadership that will bring creative, data-driven solutions to housing in New York City.”[Read the transcript of Mr. McGuire’s interview with the editorial board.]Brooklyn real estate values have soared, and the median price for a home in the borough is $900,000.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesNicole Gelinas, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute who is focused on urban economics and infrastructure, said the more inaccurate answers showed “a real sense of being out of touch with what’s going on in the city,” particularly regarding affordability..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}She said the last time the median home price in Brooklyn was around $100,000 may have been in the 1980s.“Buying salvaged houses in Bushwick when it was recovering from all of the fires of the 1970s — that was a unique period of time. You’re looking at 35 years or more since you could really buy anything below six figures, never mind seven figures,” she said.Of the eight candidates questioned, five — Mr. Adams, Ms. Wiley, Mr. Donovan, Ms. Morales and Ms. Garcia — live in Brooklyn.The candidates’ answers, Ms. Gelinas said, recalled a comment that George H.W. Bush made when he visited the National Grocers Association convention in Florida during the 1992 campaign. In an article that February, The New York Times reported that “a look of wonder flickered across his face” as he saw the price of a quart of milk, among other items, registered on a grocery store scanner — cementing the impression that he did not understand middle-class life. (Other media outlets have since suggested that the characterization was inaccurate.)“I think the candidate should at least have a number in the rough vicinity of what is the right number,” Ms. Gelinas said.She said that the candidates’ answers could hurt them politically, particularly as many voters in New York City seem to not be paying attention to the mayoral race and have, according to polls, not decided who they are voting for.“This is going to be the way that a lot of people are introduced to McGuire and Donovan,” she said.Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

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      How Dinkins and Giuliani Foretold the Future of American Politics

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      I remember being at the hotel on election night in 1993 where Mayor David Dinkins and his supporters had gathered to celebrate what they hoped would be his re-election. I was a reporter for The Village Voice, and the polls had been close.But it was not to be. At a certain point in the evening, the local cable news network NY1 (just about a year old at the time) called the race for Rudy Giuliani. Shortly after, some members of the mayor’s entourage thundered past me.In the mayhem, I managed to make eye contact with Lee Jones, the mayor’s press secretary, whom I had known since he worked for Mayor Ed Koch (Mr. Dinkins kept him on). I could see he was distraught. “Well,” he said, “by and large, the coalition held. The coalition held.”That may sound like spin, but it wasn’t. We knew each other quite well. I took it that he was just trying to think of something hopeful to say — and in retrospect, he wasn’t wrong.As I’ve thought back on those years in the wake of Mr. Dinkins’s passing last week, I’m floored at the extent to which the politics of New York City foreshadowed the national politics of today. If the American polity consists of two warring camps right now, we might say that the New York of that time helped blaze that unhappy trail.The 1993 race was a rematch of their 1989 contest, when Mr. Dinkins beat Mr. Giuliani by less than 50,000 votes out of nearly two million cast. In the rematch, Mr. Giuliani won by about 53,000.Both men’s coalitions were remarkably sturdy. Even with a series of tumultuous situations — like the AIDS, heroin and crack cocaine epidemics, and dark economic times that forced Mr. Dinkins to enact severe budget cuts — two relatively marginal factors seemed to tip the election. First, Mr. Dinkins lost a few thousand mostly white voters over his too-tentative handling of a riot in the Brooklyn neighborhood Crown Heights and the boycott of two Korean-owned grocery stores by Black residents. Second, Mr. Giuliani benefited from a Staten Island secession referendum that Republicans had led the way to getting on the ballot. It goosed turnout in that borough, which benefited Mr. Giuliani (Republicans knew how to put a finger on the electoral scale even then).Mr. Dinkins’s coalition was liberal, multiracial and multiethnic. It arose and came together over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. For decades before him, New York City politics had been dominated by “the three I’s”: Italy, Ireland and Israel. For three citywide offices — mayor, comptroller and City Council president — it was often the case that one would go to an Italian, one to an Irishman (or by the 1970s, Irishwoman) and one to a Jew.In that arrangement, Black people and Latinos were junior partners, and they could not win the mayoralty because they could never coalesce around a single candidate. Meanwhile, the 1980s were happening: raging inequality and the AIDS crisis; a wave of crime and homelessness; the decade of the rise of the hedge-fund titans and Manhattan real estate celebrities (including you-know-who). In addition, Mr. Koch played increasingly to white racial backlash as the years went on. The Dinkins coalition — Black people, Latinos, gays, liberal Jews, immigrants, assorted others — was an emerging New York that was mostly not invited to the conspicuous prosperity of the ’80s enjoyed by Wall Street financiers and real estate developers. Mr. Dinkins’s most historically significant accomplishment was arguably not anything he did as mayor; it was to have assembled this coalition and, with his widely admired strategist Bill Lynch, proved to the world that it could win.The Giuliani coalition was the traditional and aging New York of wealthy Manhattan elites and white ethnic populations in other boroughs — the police and firefighters, the owners of the hardware and liquor stores in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst (the “red” parts of New York City), the pressmen at the Daily News plant, the sons and daughters of the men and women who had worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the war.They were white. As such, they were privileged, even if it often didn’t feel that way to them. By and large they did not like the changes, like letting Black and Latino people into their unions and neighborhoods, that the emerging New York was seeking to impose on them. In Mr. Giuliani, they found their avenger.Fundamentally, those two coalitions in our largest city are now our two coalitions in the United States. And just as those two mayoral elections were close, hard-fought referendums on which New York would have power, our recent national elections have followed exactly the same pattern. Emerging America won in 2008 and 2012. Backlash prevailed narrowly in 2016. Then, a few thousand votes switched, and multiracial America won again.In some ways, I feel like I’ve been watching the same movie for 30 years. It even has some of the same stars, saying some of the same kinds of things. Of that 1989 election, Mr. Giuliani once told the journalist Jack Newfield: “They stole that election from me. They stole votes in the Black parts of Brooklyn, and in Washington Heights.”Mr. Dinkins, though a good and decent man, in the end didn’t have the political vision and will to transcend the divisions. Mr. Giuliani, like his friend President Trump, didn’t have them, either (in his case, more by choice).But these days I wonder who can transcend them. I know Joe Biden wants to, but I sure don’t get the feeling the other side wants to play along. Lee Jones was righter than he knew, not just about 1993 but also about what’s unfolded ever since: The two coalitions have not only held; they’ve metastasized. I may be watching this movie the rest of my life.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More