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      New York City Is Getting Tired of Mayor Adams’s Scandals

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      No sooner did Mayor Eric Adams of New York land in Washington, D.C., on city business Thursday than he had to turn right back around to take care of his own.The F.B.I. had raided the Brooklyn home of Mr. Adams’s top fund-raiser, Brianna Suggs. Parts of a search warrant obtained by The Times suggest that federal prosecutors in Manhattan are trying to determine if the mayor’s 2021 campaign conspired with the Turkish government and a Brooklyn construction company to direct foreign money into the campaign through straw donations.A spokesman said Mr. Adams had rushed back to New York from Washington “to deal with a matter.” You don’t say.Mr. Adams so far has not been accused of any wrongdoing. But this kind of drama and foolishness doesn’t serve the city, or him. Though he will have to answer for it, a fund-raising scandal engulfing the mayor is about the last thing New York needs.The city, home to large Jewish and Muslim communities, is reeling from the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Hate crimes against both groups are on the rise. Posters of missing loved ones kidnapped by Hamas line the city streets. Palestinian American New Yorkers are getting word of relatives killed in Israeli airstrikes.More than 130,000 migrants have arrived in the city over the past year and a half, and the city has run out of places to put them. That’s the very issue that led Mr. Adams to visit the nation’s capital on Thursday to seek federal help.Thanks to the city’s continuing housing crisis, more than 119,320 students enrolled in New York’s public schools are homeless, according to new data released this week. That figure is based on last year’s enrollment and is likely roughly 30,000 higher. The city is also still struggling to recover from the pandemic, in myriad ways.Mr. Adams is working on all of these issues. So I’m hopeful that the mayor, who is up for re-election in 2025, can take this moment to think carefully about the people he wants to surround himself with while running America’s biggest city. This seems to be a blind spot for him, as he has formed an inner circle that often appears to be particularly shaped by loyalty, sometimes at the expense of ethics or the interest of taxpayers.It isn’t just Ms. Suggs. Eric Ulrich, Mr. Adams’s former building commissioner and a former campaign adviser, was indicted on bribery charges in September. In July the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, charged six people — including a former N.Y.P.D. inspector who is also a friend of the mayor — with campaign finance violations, accusing them of being part of a conspiracy to direct public matching funds to Mr. Adams’s campaign through straw donors in a bid to seek political favors.More often, though, the mayor’s personnel decisions have simply raised questions about his judgment. There’s Timothy Pearson, a senior adviser and friend who is under review by the city’s Department of Investigation for an altercation in which he shoved a security guard at a migrant center and threatened her job, according to reports. The mayor appointed his brother Bernard Adams to a senior position at City Hall, leading to public concerns about nepotism. An agreement with the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board prevented the mayor’s brother from receiving a $210,000 salary for the position. He received a salary of $1 per year and resigned in February.And far more alarming than nepotism was the mayor’s decision this week to promote the commissioner of the corrections department, Louis Molina, to a job at City Hall. Mr. Molina has run the Rikers Island jail complex since January 2022, and it is verging on collapse. In September, as the violence and chronic staff absenteeism continued at the jails, Mr. Molina and his top aides took a taxpayer-funded trip to Europe to visit jails in London and Paris, according to The New York Daily News. Instead of holding Mr. Molina accountable for this questionable use of city funds, Mr. Adams announced on Oct. 31 that Mr. Molina would serve at City Hall as the assistant deputy mayor for public safety. “Lou has demonstrated exceptional leadership,” the mayor said of Mr. Molina in a statement this week.Maybe I’m naïve to expect more from the mayor. Public corruption scandals have become commonplace. Trust in institutions is at a serious low. All the more reason to hold Mr. Adams to account for the way he conducts the city’s business, and his own.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

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      Michael Heseltine’s air raid shows why levelling up from the top down is doomed to fail | Tim Adams

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      There is a long and disastrous history of entitled Englishmen redrawing border lines. In an interview published last week, Michael Heseltine revealed that in his political youth he, characteristically, had created the new English county boundaries of the 1972 Local Government Act simply by hiring a light aircraft and flying over the green and pleasant land.Ancient territories were erased or reshaped from 2,000ft in the creation of five extensive new urban authorities. “You could see where [conurbations] began and ended,” Hezza recalled, “and I would just tick local authorities in, out, in, out whatever it may be.” I remember one minor effect of that shift from ground level; overnight, my school exercise books lost their distinctive Warwickshire bear-and-ragged-staff coat of arms, as the town in which I lived was subsumed into the ahistorical sprawl of the West Midlands – part of a new Britain bluntly demarcated into urban and beyond. Heseltine’s comment came as part of a comprehensive Harvard University study into the reasons why the country’s regional inequalities have in the years since, only grown. As instructive as his airy reorganisation strategy were his comments on the ways that efforts at “levelling up” have always been undone by ministers abandoning the better plans of predecessors for grand schemes of their own. As our history proves, the easy bit is redrawing the map; what follows, less so.Magic kingdomThe British Library’s Fantasy exhibition offers, among other things, a fabulous thousand-year backstory to the dressing-up-box goblins and witches trick-or-treating this Halloween. In selections from the manuscripts of fantasy writers from the Gawain poet through to Ursula K Le Guin, it freeze-frames twilight moments in creative lives. Seeing the mundane inspirations for stories that have shaped generations of young minds – JM Barrie’s map of Kensington Gardens, say – makes those imaginative departures all the more magical. I remember experiencing the almost physical freefall of Alan Garner’s collapsing of a recognisable teenage present into timeless Welsh mythology in The Owl Service. Seeing an owl-patterned plate from Garner’s dinner table that provoked that time travel triggered a 40-year-old vertigo again.Eggs is eggsAs a document of our times, it would be hard to beat Unilever’s 2021 report into the higher values represented by its brand-leader Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which, it was claimed, “inspired more than 200 million people across the US, Canada and the UK to waste less food …” Investors, it seems, were deaf to such messages. One UK fund manager, Terry Smith, despaired at Unilever’s efforts to attach save-the-world philosophies to each of its 300 mass-market products. “The Hellmann’s brand has existed since 1913 so we would guess that by now consumers have figured out its purpose (spoiler alert – salads and sandwiches),” he wrote. Buyers seemed to agree. Falling sales have prompted a change of heart from Unilever’s new chief executive: “I believe that a social purpose is not something that we should force on to every brand,” he said last week. Sometimes salad dressing is just salad dressing.Amen cornerMike Johnson, the unhinged new Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, explained his wife’s absence from the swearing-in proceedings by the fact that “she’s spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord. And she’s a little worn out.” His remark brought to mind the only persuasive scientific experiment into the power of prayer, conducted by Voltaire in 1765: “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one,” the philosopher declared. “‘O Lord make my [religious] enemies ridiculous.’ And lo, God granted it.” More

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      Early Voting Begins in New York: Here’s What to Know

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      Although no citywide offices are being contested this year, the New York City Council is up for election, and voters statewide will consider two ballot questions.Election Day is still several days away, but voters in New York can get a head start on Saturday, when early voting begins.There are some interesting New York City Council races on the ballot. One features two sitting council members who are fighting bitterly over a redrawn district in southern Brooklyn; one of the candidates switched parties and is now running as a Republican. Another face-off pits two newcomers in a nearby district that was recently created to amplify the voices of Asian voters.But for most New Yorkers, it will be a relatively quiet Election Day, with no presidential, governor or mayoral races on the ballot this year.What is on the ballot this year?Your ballot might include races for the City Council, district attorney, judges and two statewide ballot measures.The City Council is led by Democrats, and they are expected to keep control of the legislative body. But some local races have been contentious, and Republicans have been trying to increase their power in a city that has long favored Democrats.There are district attorney races in the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island, but only Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney, faces a challenger. The two statewide ballot measures involve a debt limit for small city school districts and the construction of sewage facilities.How do I vote?Early voting starts on Oct. 28 and ends Nov. 5. You can find your polling location online.Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 7, and polls are open from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m.Absentee ballots are available for people who are out of town, ill or have other reasons they cannot vote in person, though the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot online has passed.Are there any close races?One of the most interesting races is the clash in Brooklyn between Justin Brannan, a Democrat and chair of the Council’s Finance Committee, and Ari Kagan, a council member who recently left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party.Mr. Brannan, a former punk rock guitarist, is running in a swing district against Mr. Kagan, a former radio and TV show host from Belarus. The two have quarreled over the city’s handling of the migrant crisis, abortion and other issues.Another council member, Inna Vernikov, a Republican, is running for re-election after being charged with openly carrying a gun at a pro-Palestinian rally — an event that she opposed and was observing.In Queens, Vickie Paladino, a Republican council member, is facing a challenge from Tony Avella, a Democratic former state senator. In the Bronx, Marjorie Velázquez, a Democratic council member, has had strong union support as she runs against a Republican challenger, Kristy Marmorato, an X-ray technician hoping to replicate her party’s showing in 2021, when Curtis Sliwa, a Republican, narrowly won the district in the mayoral race over Eric Adams, a Democrat.Why is there a new City Council district?The city’s redistricting commission sought to reflect the growth in the city’s Asian population, and created a City Council district in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which has a majority of Asian residents. The so-called Asian opportunity district has no incumbent.The two main candidates are Chinese American. Susan Zhuang, a Democrat and chief of staff to a state assembly member, is running against Ying Tan, a Republican and community activist.The Republican Party has made inroads with some Asian voters in New York, and Ms. Tan has focused on crime. Her campaign website promises to “bring law and order back!”A third candidate, Vito LaBella, a former police lieutenant, is running on the Conservative line after losing the Republican primary to Ms. Tan.What issues are on voters’ minds?New Yorkers are concerned about many pressing issues: an influx of migrants from the southern border, public safety, the city’s housing and affordability crisis, and the recent attacks in Israel.Roughly 58 percent of New York State voters agree with Mayor Adams that the migrant issue “will destroy New York City,” according to a recent Siena College poll.On Israel, about 50 percent of voters believe that a “large-scale Israeli attack in Gaza is too risky,” but that Israel “must try everything” to rescue hostages taken by Hamas, according to the poll. Nearly one-third of voters said that a “large-scale attack” in Gaza was warranted.Steven Greenberg, a Siena College pollster, also noted that a “Republican came within seven points of being elected governor” last year, when Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, beat Lee Zeldin, then a Republican congressman. With Republicans gaining ground in New York State, Mr. Greenberg said that the poll showed the “worst-ever” approval ratings for President Biden in New York. More

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      What Happened When Fake Trump Signs Appeared in Greenwich, Connecticut

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      The placards were up in a wealthy town for less than a day. The fight over them lasted years.The sudden sprouting of red-and-white campaign signs upended one autumn morning in the affluent Connecticut town of Greenwich. It was as if the valuable ground had been sprinkled overnight with political pixie dust.The signs seemed at first to blend into the election-time foliage, conveying customary solidarity between a local Republican candidate and his party’s standard-bearer. “Vote Republican — Vote Team,” they said. “Trump/Camillo.”But instead of instilling pride of party unity, the signs caused local Republicans to lose their Connecticut Yankee cool. How dare someone link a Greenwich Republican candidate with the Republican president of the United States!Outraged texts, emails and phone calls heated up that chilly October morning in 2019. “It was a general frenzy and maybe panic,” a party leader later recalled. “Like: ‘What are these?’ ‘Where did they come from?’ ‘What do we do about them?’”The Greenwich tempest that came to be known as “Signgate” was, in some ways, larger than Greenwich itself, touching on national politics, election integrity and free speech. But it was also exquisitely parochial, reflecting the acutely petty vibe of local politics, the clash of big personalities in a small space — and sweet, delicious revenge.Politics in this town of about 63,000, once a bastion for Republican moderates, have gotten complicated in recent years, with Trumpian Republicanism emerging like a wet Saint Bernard galumphing through a staid garden party.Mr. Trump had lost Greenwich by a sizable margin in the 2016 presidential elections; in many ways he was the antithesis to the town’s favored Republican son, George H.W. Bush. Still, your dog is your dog, leashed or unleashed.By 2019, local Republican discomfort in the Age of Trump seemed overripe for Democratic mockery, so a certain Greenwich police captain — an outspoken Democrat when off-duty — took it upon himself to exercise the time-tested political ploy of satire. He chose as his subject the Republican candidate for the mayor-like position of first selectman, Fred Camillo, who was consistently deflecting calls to either embrace or denounce Mr. Trump.Some residents had even threatened to pull their support if the generally well-liked Mr. Camillo did not reject the generally not-liked Mr. Trump and his policies. His response, he later recalled, was: “That’s not my concern. Your concern should be how I vote. Do I respond to you? What my beliefs are.”Seeing opportunity in Mr. Camillo’s sidestepping, the police captain, Mark Kordick, spent about $250 on 50 campaign signs from a website called Signs On the Cheap. The signs, featuring the obligatory Republican elephant mascot, said in full:Local Elections MatterVote Republican — Vote TeamTRUMP/CAMILLOMake Greenwich Great AgainAt the bottom appeared “www.FredCamillo.com,” a domain name purchased months earlier by Mr. Kordick. The address redirected viewers to a militantly pro-Trump website.In the weeks to come, people would debate whether the police captain’s furtive planning was dastardly and underhanded, or merely akin to high schoolers preparing a prank before the big homecoming game. Either way, now he was set.At first, the signs seemed to blend in with other campaign placards.Leslie YagerSigngate began around midnight in late October, as an old, red Ford Escort stopped and started along the darkened streets. With Mr. Kordick behind the wheel, his college-student son, Matthew, hopped out to plant 37 Trump/Camillo signs on public property already adorned with campaign placards, adding red hues and cheeky mischief to autumn in Greenwich.The sun hadn’t yet risen when Mr. Camillo’s campaign chairman, Jack Kriskey, received his first complaint. “Then they just kept coming,” he later told investigators. Describing the reaction among Republicans as a “frenzy,” he said: “I was just getting barraged with: ‘Where did these come from?’”In frantic texts and calls to town and police officials, Republicans sought permission to remove signs they called unauthorized and deceptive. But they faced an obstacle: Campaign signs are protected speech under the First Amendment.As First Selectman Peter Tesei, a fellow Republican, explained to them in a text, “Town cannot touch political signs unless for mowing or sight line issues.”Mr. Camillo showed up at the police station to file a complaint, after which a police captain, Robert Berry, issued an internal memo that said, “We will not be getting involved in managing sign content or the removal of alleged fake signs.”But Republicans continued all day to pressure the Republican-controlled town hall. Finally, around 6 p.m., Captain Berry issued a second memo saying that the town’s law department and the Democratic and Republican town committees had agreed that the signs were “not legitimate and should be removed” — though the local Democratic leader later clarified that his committee had only determined that it had no standing since it had nothing to do with the signs.The Republican Town Committee quickly issued a statement urging supporters to take action: “Please make every effort to remove all of these signs as soon as possible.”The prank now stifled, the Camillo camp set out to expose the anonymous antagonist. A paid campaign worker identified SignsOnTheCheap.com through a Google search, then hired someone in Texas to go to the company’s shop in Austin and get a copy of the invoice by pretending to represent the customer.The impostor was paid $450, plus a $50 bonus, for securing an invoice bearing a familiar Greenwich name.A week after the offending signs were placed, Fred Camillo won the election.Jane Beiles for The New York TimesMr. Camillo already disliked Mr. Kordick, who often criticized him and other Republicans on social media; in a recent text to a town lawyer, he had called the police captain a fat so-and-so who would “get his too.” Now that Mr. Kordick had been outed, the candidate wrote to a supporter: “He is the biggest scum bag of all. He better pray that I do not win because I would be police commissioner and he will be gone.”Mr. Kordick was called into the deputy chief’s office, a few doors down from his own. When asked whether he knew anything about those Trump/Camillo signs, he recalled answering: “I know quite a bit about them.”Mr. Kordick joined the department in 1988, worked his way up the ranks, and received the latest of his glowing performance evaluations just four months earlier. Now he was being placed on administrative leave by a longtime colleague — and would soon be under internal investigation.A week later, Mr. Camillo was elected first selectman and, effectively, police commissioner. Not good for a certain police captain.Five months after that, in April 2020, Mr. Kordick retired with a full pension just as he was about to be fired for violating provisions of the police department’s Unified Policy Manual, including “Using Common Sense and Promoting Positive Values.” The next month, he filed notice of his intent to sue.In his lawsuit against Greenwich, Mr. Camillo and three other Republicans, Mr. Kordick alleged that he had been retaliated against for exercising his free-speech rights, and that the Camillo campaign had jeopardized his employment by using deceit to unmask him.“His speech was totally off-duty and clearly protected speech,” his lawyer, Lewis Chimes, said. “If it interferes with the performance of one’s duties, there’s a balancing test. But there wasn’t any real argument that it interfered with his duties, because he’d gotten outstanding reviews.”But the town attorney, Barbara Schellenberg, rejected the framing of the case as being about Mr. Kordick’s free-speech rights. She said the question came down to: “Can he effectively do this job after putting out what the town maintained was false speech? And hiding that? And not coming forward until he was put on the spot?“It was determined that he could not effectively continue,” Ms. Schellenberg added. “The chief lost trust in him.”Years of legal squabbling followed. All the while, local politics became more and more un-Greenwichlike, smashing the stereotype of fiscal restraint and social moderation being discussed over cucumber sandwiches and wine. Mr. Trump lost the town in the 2020 presidential election by an even wider margin than in 2016, but Trumpism had taken root. In 2022, a hard-right faction took over the Republican Town Committee — and are now planning to seize control of the Representative Town Meeting, the 230-member (!) legislative body whose powers include final say on any municipal expenditure over $5,000.As the Kordick lawsuit unfolded, things got a bit messy. Town officials gave vague, sometimes conflicting depositions. Leslie Yager, a journalist who runs a one-person news site called Greenwich Free Press, was subpoenaed by the town, which “effectively silenced me as a reporter,” she said in an email.And mortifying emails and text messages became public. Mr. Camillo, first selectman and author of the “scum bag” and fat so-and-so epithets, had to acknowledge in a deposition that his colorful words were “not language that I would condone.”A Superior Court judge dropped two defendants from the lawsuit, and Mr. Kordick reached settlements with Mr. Camillo and his campaign manager for undisclosed amounts. But the case continued against the Town of Greenwich, as its legal bills climbed into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.Just two months ago, the town sought to block Mr. Kordick’s actions from being referred to as “parody or satire,” arguing in a motion that the signs were not in the vein of “A Modest Proposal,” in which Jonathan Swift proposed to “solve” the problem of Irish poverty by killing and eating Irish children. Rather, the signs were a “dirty trick,” defined by Black’s Law Dictionary as dishonest activity “carried out to harm the reputation or success of a rival.”In other words, in Greenwich, linking a local Republican candidate to the Republican president would do that candidate harm.Mr. Kordick’s lawyer described the motion as “chutzpah,” and noted that the judge had already written that a reasonable jury might conclude the signs were “acceptable political parody.”Suddenly, last month, more than three years after the sprouting of the offending signs and just a week before the case against Greenwich was to be heard, a settlement was reached with Mr. Kordick for $650,000. The overall cost to Greenwich taxpayers: $1.5 million.Ms. Schellenberg, the town attorney, said that while she was confident Greenwich would have prevailed if the case had gone to trial, it “had no viable option but to comply with the demand of its insurance carrier to end the case.”She said the town continued to maintain that “there is no constitutional protection for speech that is intentionally false or deceptive, or recklessly indifferent to the truth,” or “for speech by an employee that disrupts or threatens to disrupt the operations of the department in which that employee works.”Mr. Kordick countered that Greenwich had infringed on his First Amendment rights and knew it would lose in court. “The reason I wanted to remain anonymous is that I feared retribution,” he said. “Which is what I got.”It’s late October again in Greenwich, with leaves turning and campaigns competing. That hard-right contingent is girding to take over the Representative Town Meeting in next month’s elections. Donald Trump is in the midst of another presidential run, notwithstanding his four criminal indictments. Fred Camillo, who declined to comment other than to say the case was resolved, is running for a third term.And Mark Kordick, forcibly retired police captain, said he is once again thinking of exercising his free-speech rights with a few campaign signs. Signs that might say, in part: “Paid for with proceeds from the settlement of Mark Kordick v. Town of Greenwich et al.” More

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      Levi’s Heir Daniel Lurie to Challenge San Francisco Mayor London Breed

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      Daniel Lurie, 46, said he would run for mayor next year, at a time when many voters in the city are in a sour mood.Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss clothing fortune, announced on Tuesday that he would run against Mayor London Breed of San Francisco next year, at a time when the city is struggling to overcome a number of crises in its downtown core.Mr. Lurie, 46, planned to launch his campaign Tuesday at a community center in the city’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, a longtime working-class area now dotted with multimillion-dollar homes and upscale shops. His entrance in the race signals that Ms. Breed may be vulnerable in her bid for re-election and may have lost the support of some moderate allies.Mr. Lurie said in an interview that he intended to campaign on solving the city’s quality-of-life problems, and that he blames Ms. Breed for doing too little to tackle them.Mr. Lurie is the founder of Tipping Point, an anti-poverty nonprofit. He said that he decided to run for mayor when he was walking his 9-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter to school, and they saw a man stumbling down the street, naked and screaming.Noting that nobody did anything about the situation, himself included, he said he was troubled that city leaders and residents had apparently grown numb to such scenes.“Our kids have come to a place where they’re inured,” he said. “It’s almost like they accept it, which is not OK.”Mr. Lurie filed paperwork for his candidacy on Tuesday at the San Francisco Department of Elections office as his wife, Becca Prowda, looked on.Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesThough many San Francisco neighborhoods came through the pandemic relatively unscathed, the city’s downtown has suffered. Offices have been left vacant while employees work remotely at home. Retailers have struggled, while homeless encampments, fentanyl overdoses and property crimes have endured as serious problems.Mr. Lurie said Ms. Breed had accomplished little, even though voters approved higher taxes to finance homeless services and low-income housing. He said that as mayor, he would add more psychiatric beds to the city’s hospitals, expand the shelter system and pay homeless people to clean the sidewalks.He also said he would place more police officers on the streets and compel more people who are severely mentally ill into treatment, even if they refuse care. San Francisco is one of seven counties in California that will begin a court program this fall with the authority to force people with severe mental illness to be hospitalized if they refuse treatment.Maggie Muir, a spokeswoman for Ms. Breed’s campaign, said Mr. Lurie’s platform did not depart from what the mayor was already trying to do. The only difference, she said, was that Mr. Lurie lacked government experience.“Mayor Breed is working every day to make San Francisco safer and cleaner,” Ms. Muir said. “Why should we trust a beginner to accomplish these things faster?”Ms. Breed, 49, and Mr. Lurie are both San Francisco natives and Democrats, but have very different backgrounds. Ms. Breed, the first Black woman to lead the city, was raised by her grandmother in public housing near City Hall, and now rents an apartment in the Lower Haight, a lively neighborhood popular among young tenants for its restaurants, nightclubs and colorful Victorian homes.Mr. Lurie and Ms. Prowda walked down a hallway at the Department of Elections.Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesFew San Francisco residents have family ties — or riches — that extend as far back in the city as Mr. Lurie’s do. When he was a young child, his mother married Peter Haas, a great grand-nephew of Levi Strauss, the German immigrant who opened a dry goods shop in San Francisco in 1853, when the city was bustling with new arrivals seeking gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Mr. Strauss found his own fortune by making durable denim pants for miners, and his company is still synonymous with bluejeans today.Mr. Lurie’s mother, Mimi Haas, is a billionaire. His father, Rabbi Brian Lurie, was the executive director of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco. Daniel Lurie is living in Potrero Hill temporarily while his house in Pacific Heights, the wealthy residential area where he grew up, is being renovated.Defeating an incumbent mayor in San Francisco is rarer than a fog-free day in summer; it last happened 28 years ago, when Willie Brown beat Frank Jordan, a former police chief. Unlike Mr. Lurie, Mr. Brown entered that race with extraordinary name recognition, having served as speaker of the California State Assembly for nearly 15 years.Even so, Mayor Breed appears vulnerable as the November 2024 election approaches. While San Francisco residents fiercely defend their city against critics, few are sticking up for her. In poll after poll, city residents have said the city is on the wrong track and that Breed is mishandling the city’s recovery from the pandemic. Her approval ratings hover at about 33 percent.Mr. Lurie joins a mayoral field that so far has just one other challenger: Ahsha Safaí, a San Francisco supervisor and a Democrat, who has centered his campaign on addressing retail theft and expanding the number of police officers. San Francisco will hold one nonpartisan contest for mayor next year, using a system that allows voters to rank their preferred candidates in order. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the ranked order would determine the winner and avoid a runoff.San Francisco voters have been in a foul mood. In 2022, they recalled Chesa Boudin, the district attorney, and three members of the school board. Local political consultants said that Ms. Breed was at risk, but that Mr. Lurie will have to overcome progressive voters’ skepticism toward a wealthy candidate, as well as a lack of experience.“He hasn’t gained traction with even the business community as a strong leader who actually has the know-how and spine to shake things up,” said Jim Stearns, a San Francisco political consultant who has worked on past San Francisco campaigns but is not involved in the mayoral race.Mr. Lurie said that he wants to use his privilege to help the city — and that he would ensure that his administration is as ethnically diverse as the city itself.Asked to name the mayor he most admires, Mr. Lurie pointed to Mr. Brown of San Francisco and to Michael Bloomberg of New York City, both known for their pro-business, moderate politics.“Whatever you think of them, they got stuff done,” Mr. Lurie said. “I am bullish on San Francisco, and I’m looking forward to helping put this city back on the right track.” More

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      AfD Candidate Loses Race for Mayor in Nordhausen, Germany

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      Voters on Sunday rejected the candidate for the hard-line Alternative for Germany Party, which is rattling German national politics, in the race for mayor in the city of Nordhausen.With a colorless and reputedly prickly small-city mayor being challenged by a far-right candidate known for his charisma and business success, many Germans feared that the hard-line Alternative for Germany party was about to win its first City Hall.But when the ballots were counted Sunday evening, voters in the city of Nordhausen had decisively returned their mayor to office, dealing a setback to a party that has drawn on nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment to secure a firm hold in German politics.“I thought it would be much, much closer,” said an early-round mayoral candidate, Andreas Trump, who ran for the conservative Christian Democrats and did not endorse a candidate for fear of driving voters into the arms of the rightists.The election came as Alternative for Germany, which has a nationalist, anti-migrant platform, is on the rise across the country. The party, known as the AfD, won only 10 percent of the votes in the 2021 general election, but since then, it has benefited from frustration with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party government, the rising cost of living, worries about the war in Ukraine and a surge in immigration.Now, the AfD is regularly above 20 percent in national opinion polls, well ahead of Mr. Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats. In the five states that were once part of East Germany, nearly a third of voters say they back it.A question-and-answer session for AfD supporters and residents in Gera, in eastern Thuringia, in June.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesBefore the vote in Nordhausen, in which the incumbent, Mayor Kai Buchmann, was challenged by the AfD candidate, Jörg Prophet, many thought the rightists might make a significant inroad into German governance.“Nordhausen is simply swept up in the blue wave,” Thomas Müller, a former local journalist, said, referring the party’s campaign color.Still, it was unclear if Nordhausen, despite its history as an East German municipality, would topple. A quaint city of 42,000 known for its schnapps distillery, it is an exemplar of Germany’s investment in its east, with modern trams and an impeccably maintained medieval quarter.“It’s not an especially right-leaning place,” Mr. Müller said.On Sunday, 55 percent voted for Mr. Buchmann, with 45 percent voting for Mr. Prophet.Benjamin Höhne, a political scientist who studies Alternative for Germany, said that winning the mayor’s office would have represented “another important step in the AfD’s normalization strategy.”“By showing they can take on communal executive responsibility, the hard-right-wing extremist core, which is increasingly crystallizing, appears to recede into the background,” he said,Nordhausen, a city with modern trams and a well-maintained medieval quarter, is home to about 42,000 people.Ronny Hartmann/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis summer, AfD candidates won runoffs to lead a district in southern Thuringia and a small town in another eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt. The party has also gained ground at the state level. In Thuringia, Christian Democrats recently pushed through a property tax measure with AfD votes, three years after an outcry when mainstream parties allied with the far right to briefly oust the state’s leftist governor.None of this, however, means that the AfD is abandoning its extremes.That may have proved Mr. Prophet’s undoing.In the days after the first mayoral vote in Nordhausen, he turned away from city issues and solicited the help of two prominent AfD party figures who came to give speeches. He also refused to distance himself from Björn Höcke, the party’s most famous far-right extremist.“If he had really limited himself to just the municipal issues — there’s no telling how it would have turned out,” said Mr. Trump.The AfD leader Björn Höcke, speaking at a rally in Dresden in 2020, is viewed as one of the party’s most extreme figures.Gordon Welters for The New York Times More

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      Christine Quinn Fights for Migrants and the Homeless. Could It Destroy Her Dream?

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      Christine C. Quinn was impatient. The leader of New York City’s largest provider of shelter for homeless families with children, she peered over her fuchsia reading glasses at her team, assembled in a conference room, and rattled off a list of instructions.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.It was a few weeks after she had helped persuade the City Council to pass some of the most consequential legislation on the worst homelessness crisis in New York City’s history, and a few days before Mayor Eric Adams would veto those bills.Ms. Quinn, the former City Council speaker, directed one of her staff members to offer to brief a deputy mayor on the legislation. She named a handful of journalists who might write more about the bills, a move that she knew would frustrate City Hall’s press office.She rolled her eyes at the mention of one advocacy group she considered especially ponderous, joking it would take months to release new data. And she snapped her fingers at no one in particular as she asked whether a meeting scheduled for the next day could be moved up to that afternoon, or even sooner.“I miss being able to pick up the phone and say, ‘Do this, do it now, get it done,’” she said later.It only takes a few minutes in Ms. Quinn’s presence to understand that she is itching to return to the action and authority of elected office.Once the city’s second-most powerful politician, Ms. Quinn is now a high-profile advocate on one of the most divisive issues in New York City — one that could threaten her chances with voters in the future.As protests against waves of migrants coming into the city grow louder and larger, and New York’s Democrats cannot seem to settle on a path forward, the city’s shelter population has exploded to over 100,000 people — all while affordable housing lags pitifully behind demand.Ms. Quinn has jumped into the fray.Over the past few months, she helped set the stage for the most contentious fight yet between the Council and Mr. Adams, after leading an effort to secure enough votes for the Council to override the mayor’s opposition to the bills.The package of bills that she helped create is part of a push to help free up space in shelters for asylum seekers. The bills will reduce the time homeless people need to wait to look for permanent housing after they enter a shelter, make more homeless people eligible for vouchers that help them pay rent for permanent housing and provide vouchers for those at risk of being evicted.Ms. Quinn, 57, has spent the last eight years using her knowledge of local politics to build an advocacy arm for Win, the shelter provider, and the organization has since become a frequent thorn in the mayor’s side — even as it receives most of its annual funding through contracts with the city.She may no longer run the Council, but she has become a kind of elder stateswoman on homelessness and housing for an especially green group of legislators.For a while after she lost the Democratic primary for mayor in 2013, it was weird to come back to City Hall, Ms. Quinn said. But these days, she embraces the Council’s security guard and janitor on her way into the building.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThough Ms. Quinn is firmly back in the mix of New York politics, there is only so much an advocate can do from the outside. The kind of power she really wants is still to be found elsewhere.Ms. Quinn was once considered the person most likely to become the city’s first female and first openly gay mayor. That expectation evaporated in 2013 amid a disastrous Democratic primary in which she went from front-runner to also-ran. For years afterward, she operated largely behind the scenes.Now, she is not coy about still wanting to be mayor one day.That aspiration has created a conundrum for Ms. Quinn: The better she is at expanding Win’s influence, the more she risks alienating the New Yorkers who increasingly view the influx of migrants as a strain on the city and say officials have done enough for them.“Quinn is trying to have a really hard conversation with New Yorkers,” said Christina Greer, a professor of political science at Fordham University. “She’s chosen an issue that is of great import but doesn’t really do her any favors” if she wants to run for any elected office in New York.Even as she says she has no plans to run in a primary against Mr. Adams, she has emerged as a prominent foil, challenging his warnings that the migrant crisis will “destroy” New York and protesting his push to weaken the city’s right-to-shelter law and his declaration that migrant families might be moved into mass shelters.She likes to tell a story about mothers at a Win shelter pooling their extra clothes to donate to migrants as proof that vulnerable families will not be pitted against each other.But the city’s twin homelessness and migrant crises defy such neat packaging.As she looks ahead, Ms. Quinn says she knows full well that these issues are stubborn, at the very least. Making a real dent in homelessness — to say nothing of the migrant crisis — would take a decade or more, Ms. Quinn says, a challenge no mayor can credibly promise to solve in two terms.She knows that voters are not always forgiving of her perceived stumbles. And she is not surprised that some regard her as a politician playing at advocacy before she runs again.For now, Ms. Quinn insists she is unconcerned.“When are you really going to use your capital, when are you really going to do something? In the next job?” she said. “You know, I thought I was going to get the next job. I didn’t.”Crossroads of powerWin, the nation’s largest provider of shelter for homeless families with children, operated shelters but did not have an advocacy arm when Ms. Quinn became its chief executive in 2015. She quickly set about changing that.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe George Washington statue in the white marble lobby of City Hall stands at a crossroads of power.To the right are the Council’s offices, where Ms. Quinn long made her mark on the city.To the left is the mayor’s office, where she assumed she was heading as 2013 drew closer.That race was supposed to be Ms. Quinn’s coronation, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was leaving an open seat for a Democrat to seize. By then, Ms. Quinn had earned a reputation as a pragmatic speaker who vastly expanded the Council’s influence, passing legislation in part by her sheer force of will, including the occasional burst of straight-up yelling.In the primary’s final stretch, her opponents cast her as the second coming of Mr. Bloomberg, a moderate at a moment that demanded something more radical. In what ended up being a fatal blow to her chances, Ms. Quinn had paved the way for Mr. Bloomberg to run a third time by helping overturn the city’s term limits law, a move that voters had soured on.To some, Ms. Quinn seemed to be saying she should be mayor simply because she really, really wanted to be.She finished third, losing to Bill de Blasio.Ms. Quinn spent the first few months of 2014 willing herself to leave her Chelsea apartment.After finishing a distant third in the primary, Ms. Quinn endorsed Bill de Blasio, the winner. She said she spent the next few months struggling to get out of bed.Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesEventually, after a stint working as a special adviser for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and a fellowship at Harvard, Ms. Quinn got a call from a headhunter about Win. Part of it felt like a homecoming. She had spent the early part of her career as a tenant organizer, and, as speaker, she successfully sued Mr. Bloomberg’s administration over its push to limit eligibility for shelter spots and made it easier for tenants to sue their landlords.When she took over in 2015, she quickly began trying to shift the public’s perception of homelessness. New Yorkers knew they were seeing mentally ill people on the streets, but they often did not realize that the majority of the city’s homeless population is made up of families with children, many of whom have 9-to-5 jobs.But there was no way to get people to listen without changing something about Win, which ran shelters but did not advocate on behalf of homeless families.Ms. Quinn began training her staff to become political activists. They have distributed iPads and other devices to 1,600 homeless students learning remotely and created a legal clinic to help migrants apply for asylum.Under her direction, Win — which employs 1,000 people with an annual budget of about $150 million — added seven new shelters and now operates 14. They serve about 7,000 people nightly, and, recently, over 270 families seeking asylum, including about 700 children. Ms. Quinn makes $424,000 a year, roughly triple what she made as speaker.While she has found her way back to a version of a life she never wanted to leave, some of her former peers or rivals have struggled to do the same. Several — Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Bloomberg, and her two successors as speaker — have run for other offices they did not win. Some of her male peers fell in sexual misconduct scandals, including Anthony Weiner, who helped topple Ms. Quinn in 2013.Ms. Quinn may be the only one of the bunch who still has a job that requires telling people things they do not want to hear, over and over.She is used to that.Nice until it wasn’tMs. Quinn visited children living at the Shirley Chisholm Family Residence, a new Win shelter in Park Slope that drew some opposition from local residents.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesSome years ago, Ms. Quinn and an aide walked to the back of a restaurant and found James Gandolfini, the star of “The Sopranos,” waiting for them. He was unhappy. Ms. Quinn had been pushing to open a sanitation department garage in his TriBeCa neighborhood.Mr. Gandolfini, who died in 2013, told her if she did not reconsider, he was prepared to blanket TriBeCa with fliers criticizing her. She told him to do what he needed to do.“It was a nice conversation until it wasn’t,” Ms. Quinn recalled. “You can’t have a city that calls itself fair and equitable if only some parts of the city are doing their part.”That is particularly true when you are building homeless shelters in neighborhoods where many residents do not want them.Consider Win’s newest shelter, set to serve about 200 families on Staten Island.At a 2019 town hall, Ms. Quinn sought to explain that Staten Island needed a shelter in part so that the borough’s many homeless families could remain close to their children’s public schools. Residents appeared unmoved, and Ms. Quinn was greeted by “an aggressively pissed off” group, she recalled.Afterward, The Staten Island Advance published an opinion piece dismissing her chances amid rumors of another run: “Christine Quinn for mayor? Not after homeless shelter debacle.”It is a change for Ms. Quinn, who spent years fending off criticism from progressives who found her too cozy with Mr. Bloomberg and his conservative allies. Now, she is going up against a highly passionate force that is skeptical of new shelters. While the migrant crisis has prompted a reshaping of that movement to include more Democrats, it has been led by Republican politicians and advocates.Protesters rallied against a facility housing migrants on Staten Island in August. Demonstrations against migrant shelters have become larger in recent months.Stephanie Keith for The New York TimesRepresentative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, said Staten Islanders she represents are fed up with Democrats like Ms. Quinn “building shelter after shelter in communities that don’t want them” — particularly for migrants.But even some who might have been sympathetic to Ms. Quinn say they were turned off by the debate over the Win shelter, set to open later this year in an area that tends to vote Democratic.“You don’t poke a stick in the eye of a potentially favorable community,” said Michael Harwood, a member of the St. George Civic Association.Mr. Harwood said Win did not communicate effectively with residents about the impact of the shelter and noted that Ms. Quinn had opposed a new shelter in her own Manhattan district when she was speaker.Ms. Quinn says she has a new calculus for decision making.She acknowledges that some of her choices as speaker were made more because of future ambitions rather than the right policy, and she regrets it.So even as she weighs whether and how to return to elected office, she says she is focused on immediate goals: moving more families into permanent housing faster, raising more private money, making Win into a top developer of affordable housing with services for formerly homeless families — and continuing to shape city policy.But it does not always feel like enough.She recently remembered something that Judith S. Kaye, the late chief judge of New York State, once told her: She would have paid a million dollars to keep her job for just five more minutes.It was a joke, sort of. But it is how Ms. Quinn feels about being speaker, and the reason she is given to daydreaming about how much more she could accomplish on homelessness, the migrant crisis and housing if she ran the city one day.The idea of actually getting elected on the agenda of addressing those crises might seem like a bit of a fantasy.But Ms. Quinn believes, still, that there is a first time for everything in New York City politics.“In a way, it would be the greatest issue for a mayor to take on,” she said. “If you solve the unsolvable, you get credit.”Audio produced by More

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      Mayor Adams Turns His Back on Immigrants and New York’s Legacy

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      Since last year, tens of thousands of asylum seekers have arrived in New York City from the southern border and around the world, seeking a better life in a place that has welcomed generations of immigrants since its founding.What many of those migrants have found instead is a tepid welcome amid a housing crisis that has left the city barely equipped to offer them more than a meal in the hotels used to house a booming homeless population. They are lucky if they get a bed.In recent days, the slapdash system the city has built to address the crisis has broken down completely, leaving migrants sleeping on Midtown streets. The city says there is no more room for them, but advocates say it needs to try harder.And on Sunday, The Times reported that a shady contractor tapped by New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, to send asylum seekers upstate and provide them with services harassed them instead. The city’s taxpayers are footing the bill for this abuse, to the tune of $432 million. The curiously large, no-bid contract with DocGo, a medical services company, should never have been signed and needs to be terminated.It’s true, as Mr. Adams has repeatedly said, that this crisis is a national issue and requires action from the White House and Congress. Cities like New York, which has more than 100,000 people living in shelters, cannot be expected to welcome asylum seekers on their own. More than 90,000 migrants have arrived in New York City over the past year, many as part of a political stunt by Texas, Florida and Arizona. Though immigrants strengthen the U.S. economy and are a vital part of the fabric of the democracy, local governments can’t simply absorb tens of thousands of people without help — especially for housing — and their taxpayers, in New York and elsewhere, shouldn’t be expected to foot the bill.Still, there is something particularly disappointing about New York City’s official response to the asylum seekers, unfolding under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. Nearly four in 10 city residents were born outside the United States. Waves of immigrants — Dutch, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Latino and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, along with many others — helped build this city. So did millions of Black Americans who chased dreams in the city after fleeing the tyranny of the Jim Crow South.That rich legacy doesn’t seem to be on Mr. Adams’s mind. Since the moment the migrants began showing up last spring, he has made clear he wants little to do with the practical or humanitarian issues their arrival has raised. The mayor has provided basic services for the migrants, and rightly so. But at every turn, he has done so grudgingly.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesMr. Adams has complained loudly that the immigrants were a “burden” on the city’s resources. His administration shut down a welcome center at the Port Authority bus terminal where volunteers had for months helped connect asylum seekers to services.He said the migrants would cost the city $4.3 billion over the next two fiscal years, a figure New York’s nonpartisan budget watchdog said is probably $1.2 billion too high. He tried to undo a 1981 court decree that requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who needs it.He erected giant tents — now dismantled — to house the migrants in remote areas of the city inaccessible to public transit, then made it exceedingly difficult for nonprofit groups to provide critical services to this vulnerable population, like legal assistance and even help navigating the city and its laws. Such services could help migrants acclimate to life in New York City and could ease complaints from neighbors of the hotels the city is using to house many migrants.The Adams administration has been warehousing asylum seekers instead of putting the country’s largest municipal government to work helping them build new lives, in New York or wherever else they may want to go. This summer the Adams administration printed fliers to dissuade migrants from seeking new lives in New York, leaflets that sum up the mayor’s overall approach and betray the promise and spirit of New York as a home for people from around the world.New York’s leaders are supposed to be different. The city’s voters didn’t intend to elect a mayor who acted like Greg Abbott, the Texas governor who sent migrants to cities across the country, including New York. Nor did they vote for someone like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the presidential candidate who used asylum seekers for political sport, flying them to the resort island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts at taxpayer expense just to own the libs.New York can do better.First, it seems clear that Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York needs to step in and demonstrate the concern lacking from City Hall. It may be in the best interest of both taxpayers and the asylum seekers for the governor to name an expert manager to oversee the crisis, which is clearly too much for the mayor to handle — a kind of New York asylum czar.That wouldn’t free Mr. Adams to simply throw up his hands and walk away from the obligations the city has to these tens of thousands of people, whether they turn out to be temporary guests or newly minted New Yorkers.The mayor could make a big difference quickly by welcoming established nonprofit groups — not no-bid profiteers — to provide critical services where migrants are being housed. Those services should include English-language classes, as well as basic job certification courses to help asylum seekers find work.Despite Mr. Adams’s cold approach, many nonprofits and private volunteers and some municipal workers are engaged in this humanitarian work. In one small example, Dr. Theodore G. Long, a senior vice president at the city’s public hospital system, noticed many meals at the facilities used to house migrants weren’t being eaten, so he conducted a survey to find out why. The results? “We swapped out roast beef and did Italian food instead,” he told me. “I figured, let’s ask people what they want instead of guessing.”That’s the kind of welcome a city of immigrants provides.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