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      Adams’s Re-election Bid Fueled by Real Estate Titans and Out-of-Towners

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      The mayor has raised $1.3 million for re-election since January, relying on many wealthy donors from New York City and beyond.Despite falling poll numbers and critical news coverage, Mayor Eric Adams clearly has the continued monetary support of two influential spheres of influence: real estate leaders and the donor class from New York City and beyond.Mr. Adams has raised $1.3 million since January for his 2025 re-election effort in the latest reporting period, drawing maximum $2,100 donations from real estate magnates like Marc Holliday, the chief executive of SL Green, the city’s largest commercial landlord, and its founder, Steve Green; and Alexander and Helena Durst, members of The Durst Organization real estate dynasty, according to new filings with the city’s Campaign Finance Board. About $550,000 came from donors outside New York City who live in the suburbs, Florida and other states — a continuation of a pattern displayed early in his tenure, when he held fund-raisers in Beverly Hills and Chicago in his first months in office.As mayor, Mr. Adams has often taken positions that benefit the real estate industry, including being supportive of rent increases and criticizing state lawmakers for failing to replace a tax-incentive program for developers known as 421a.He has frequently met with real estate leaders and has used One Vanderbilt, one of the city’s newest skyscrapers, developed by SL Green, as a backdrop for photo ops and news conferences. As a small-time landlord, Mr. Adams once declared, “I am real estate.” And major landlords have consistently been among his most faithful donors.Mr. Adams frequently asserts that his political base of working-class New Yorkers and churchgoers understands and supports his mission. But the continued support from real estate interests only furthers the notion that Mr. Adams may be too aligned with major developers.Vito Pitta, a lawyer for the Adams campaign, insisted that the mayor’s success in addressing crime and job losses was driving donations.“Our campaign is well on its way to raising the maximum amount it can spend under the city’s campaign finance system — just 18 months into the mayor’s tenure — because New Yorkers see that Mayor Adams is lowering crime, increasing employment, and moving our city in the right direction,” Mr. Pitta said in a statement.Marc Holliday, left center, the chief executive of SL Green, the city’s largest commercial landlord, donated the maximum allowed to Mr. Adams, who watches from the side.Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesThe spending cap for the 2025 primary is $7.9 million. Under the city’s generous public financing system, his campaign is expected to have about $4.6 million on hand, after matching funds are included.Mr. Adams has faced a series of setbacks in recent weeks. His approval rating fell to 46 percent in a Siena College poll last month. A longtime associate of his was charged in a straw donor scheme to raise money for his mayoral campaign; the mayor was not implicated. The New York Times reported that a photo of a police officer killed in the line of duty, which the mayor said he had long carried in his wallet, was created by employees in the mayor’s office last year, and was made to look old.The mayor also drew attention for his response last month to an 84-year-old tenant-rights activist whose family had escaped the Holocaust. The mayor publicly likened her to a plantation owner after he believed the activist had been disrespectful to him.Still, Mr. Adams, a Democrat who ran for office on a public safety message, could be difficult to beat in 2025.He is likely eager to show off a large war chest to fend off a serious competitor. He won a competitive Democratic primary in 2021 by only 7,197 votes.“The bigger the fund-raising number, the less likely that someone else gets into the race,” said Chris Coffey, a former campaign manager for Andrew Yang, one of the mayor’s primary opponents in 2021.Mr. Coffey said that the mayor’s low approval rating was not too worrisome, noting that Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, had an approval rating as low as 24 percent in his second year in office and still won two more terms.“If the city has made progress on public safety, it’s really hard to see the mayor have any re-election challenges,” Mr. Coffey said.The real estate industry once again also provided the largest donor base for Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo Democrat who narrowly won a full four-year term in November. Of the $4.5 million her campaign raised in the first six months of the year, more than $950,000 came from developers and real estate investors, and more from other industries with business before the state, according to an analysis of her public filings by The Times.At least 45 donors connected to the real estate industry chipped in $18,000, the new legal maximum for statewide candidates, including Mr. Holliday, Scott Rechler and Jeff Blau. Mr. Rechler and Mr. Blau are both Democratic megadonors whose firms are competing with Mr. Holliday’s for a license to operate a casino in the New York City area.Gov. Kathy Hochul’s campaign raised $4.5 million since January, with roughly a fifth coming from developers and real estate investors.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesWith New York facing an affordable housing crunch, Ms. Hochul has spent much of the year fighting for new government programs to spur development. On Tuesday, she announced she would bypass opponents in the legislature and take executive actions that had been a priority of the real estate industry.Other major donors included members of the Sands family, which controls the Rochester-based beverage giant Constellation Brands; well-known Albany lobbyists Emily Giske, Giorgio DeRosa and the firm Cozen O’Connor; and tech executives like Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber. Ms. Hochul also brought in more than $250,000 at a fund-raiser this month from board members and doctors connected to Somos Community Care, a Bronx-based nonprofit that has tapped into lucrative government health programs.Ms. Hochul managed to raise the sum — plus another $1.5 million for the state Democratic Party — despite new, stricter contributions limits that cap individual gifts at $18,000, down from nearly $70,000 last election cycle. For much of the period, Ms. Hochul was also dealing with tumult within her political operation after reporting by The Times prompted the ouster of her top political aide.For his part, Mr. Adams was a prolific fund-raiser in 2021 and received significant support from a super PAC, which received donations from Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who owns the Mets and is vying for a casino license in the city. Earlier this year, SL Green retained Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff, to aid its bid to build a Caesars Palace casino in Times Square.A Broadway fund-raiser for the mayor last month at a showing of the musical “New York, New York” proved especially lucrative. The campaign raised about $600,000 at the event, which was organized by Mr. Carone, according to Evan Thies, a spokesman for the campaign.Helena Durst, principal of the Durst Organization, donated the maximum of $2,100 to Mr. Adams’s campaign.Santiago Mejia/The New York TimesFred Elghanayan, a founder of TF Cornerstone, a real estate company, and Todd Cooper, a founder of RIPCO Real Estate, both donated to the Adams campaign. A dozen people who work at Morgan & Morgan, a national personal injury law firm, donated a total of $25,000 to the mayor’s campaign. Four employees of Meridian Properties, another real estate firm, donated $8,400. Six people who work at another real estate firm, Top Rock Holdings, each gave the maximum of $2,100 to the mayor’s campaign.Many donations came from outside the state, including from Alex Havenick, a gambling and cannabis entrepreneur in Miami, and David Kovacs, a virtual reality video game developer in Miami. Brock Pierce, a cryptocurrency investor who once flew Mr. Adams to Puerto Rico on his private jet, donated $2,100. He listed his address as a ZIP code in Puerto Rico.There were plenty of smaller donations as well. A senior pastor at a church in Queens donated $250 to the mayor’s campaign, as did the director of a New York City children’s theater. More

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      Will New Yorkers Ever Have Another Mayor They Like?

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      Eric Adams — like most of his recent predecessors — hovers around a 50 percent approval rating. It’s hard to govern when only half the city is on your side.In the early 1990s, the historian Melvin Holli set out to solve a problem with a book called “America’s Big City Mayors.” Although governing a place like New York or Philadelphia was one of the most important political jobs in the country, we had no scholarly ranking of mayors, no orderly system of evaluating them as we did for presidents, thanks to the work of midcentury academics. Relying on surveys of biographers, social scientists and experts in urban policy and on an elaborate methodology, Mr. Holli concluded that Fiorello La Guardia was the best mayor in the history of the United States. No other New York mayor appeared on the “best” list; three were included among the worst.New York City is a notoriously difficult place to manage, and measuring success in real time is also complicated. On the face of it, the question of whether the current mayor is popular or not would appear to be a simple one determined by statistics, anecdote and so on, but it is knottier than that. In polling at the end of June, fewer than half of New Yorkers — 46 percent — indicated that they had a favorable opinion of Eric Adams, a decline of four points from his numbers in December.By contrast, Bill de Blasio, whose mayoralty was dominated by conversations about his irresponsible gym habits and deficits of personality, was doing a lot better at the same point in his tenure. Even as the bourgeois creative class and the business elites were coming to reject him as if he were rancid fast food, 18 months in, he was holding at a 58 percent favorability rating, with 81 percent of Black voters expressing a positive view of him.Mr. Adams’s problems occupy a wide space well outside the parameters of charisma. He has been criticized for a lack of vision or signature initiatives analogous to universal pre-K; a cronyist’s approach to staffing; a habit of petty and bizarre distortions of the truth. Some of this was predictable. During the campaign, his evasiveness led to headlines like, “Where Does Eric Adams Really Live?” because it was not obvious, a confusion that he blamed on shoddy paperwork at the hands of a homeless accountant.Last week, we learned that a picture of an old friend, a cop who died in the line of duty 36 years ago, had not in fact been held closely by the mayor in his wallet for decades as he had previously suggested. Rather, it was printed in his office last year by underlings, in response to the death of two police officers in Harlem.These shortcomings justify apprehension and may lead voters to turn toward someone new in 2025. And yet it is also true that New Yorkers hoping for a galvanizing figure, a mayor for all people, might need to adjust their expectations and make do with a mayor for half the people.Our current political landscape makes it too hard for a broad-consensus affection to emerge for anyone — it’s almost impossible to imagine how widely embraced La Guardia was, or even Ed Koch in his first term. Over the past 10 years, most mayoral approval ratings have hovered just above or below 50 percent. Although Michael Bloomberg had an approval rate of 31 percent early in his tenure, he briefly reached 75 percent during his deft handling of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, before slipping down in the years ahead.The 50 percent benchmark is so hard to surpass now, said George Arzt, a longtime political consultant in the city, because the electorate is so fragmented. La Guardia could govern well in part because as a liberal Republican who supported the New Deal he could connect to voters across constituencies. And there were simply fewer constituencies to think about.Lacking the sharp ideological divisions that burden the party today, Northeastern Democrats were unified by a strong labor movement. La Guardia had to forge an alliance with Jews and Protestants, with immigrants from Northern Europe and Southern Europe, but he was not operating in a city of 600 spoken languages. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Dominican immigrants to the city alone multiplied more than tenfold, reaching 1.1 million.Supporters of Eric Adams — and most people presumably — appreciate that violent crime and hate crimes are trending downward. Shootings have fallen 25 percent year to date. “I don’t think people are looking for vision; I think they’re looking not to get killed,” Alan Fishman, a banker, philanthropist and Adams backer, told me. “What you hear about cronyism and dysfunction, that doesn’t affect people day to day. It’s inside baseball.”What does touch people is the sincerity of the commitment. Whatever you thought of his policies, it was hard to doubt Michael Bloomberg’s devotion to New York. Mr. Adams and Mr. de Blasio have been cast as temperamental opposites, but they share a prominent trait, a deep investment in their own marketing. (This was evident most recently in Mr. de Blasio’s case, with the long, moody interview he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, gave The Times announcing their separation, when the alternative in situations like this is typically an aloof three-line news release.)Mr. de Blasio chased a national profile more or less from the moment he was elected mayor, and he was absent from the city for stretches when he ran for president, remaining in the race even though it had become clear his bid would go nowhere. Eager to engage the high-style factions of New York his predecessor ignored, Mr. Adams has been selling us on his “swagger” since his first week in office. History shows us that it is a very rare for the mayor of New York to move on to higher office. The goal ought to be legacy rather than fame. More

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      In Toronto, 102 Candidates Vie to Become Mayor of Troubled City

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      Once considered an affordable, model city, Toronto is headed for an election while struggling with the same issues confronting other big cities that are trying to recover from the pandemic.The last mayor stepped down after having an affair with his staffer.The mayor before him was stripped of his powers after he admitted to smoking crack cocaine.It would seem that being mayor of Toronto, one of the four largest cities in North America, would come with some major baggage — not to mention its crumbling transit system, growing homelessness and sporadic violent crime.Instead, 102 candidates are on the ballot to lead the city, a record for Toronto, one that underscores the public’s discontent with the city’s direction.As voters in the city of three million — Canada’s most populous and its financial center — prepare to choose a mayor on Monday, Toronto is floundering through the litany of issues that are also confronting other urban powerhouses trying to rebound from the pandemic.For decades, Toronto was known as “a city that works,” lauded as a machine oiled by orderliness and livability, with a robust inventory of affordable housing, an efficient transit system and many other markers of urban stability.Now the city is in crisis after more than a decade of steep budget cuts for social services and the devastating withdrawals of fiscal support for housing in the 1990s from higher levels of government.Voters in Toronto, the most populous city in Canada, will choose from 102 mayoral candidates.An emergency shelter in Toronto that was built as a temporary pandemic measure. Lockdowns and social distancing rules compounded issues that had been affecting the city before the pandemic.The pandemic compounded issues with lockdowns that tightened revenue streams for the city and with social distancing rules that made running it much more expensive.In February, the city’s former mayor, John Tory, resigned after admitting to an affair with a staffer, leaving the city’s deputy mayor, Jennifer McKelvie, in charge.The next mayor will be responsible for reversing the city’s course and restoring the image of the office in one of its most difficult moments. This election is seen by many as a referendum on the fiscal austerity of Toronto’s two most recent mayors, who were both conservatives.“The good news is, this is turning into a change election,” said Jennifer Keesmaat, a former chief city planner who served under those mayors. “People are saying, enough already, you had your chance with the low taxes and the low level of investment.”No matter who is elected, the winner will face a lengthy backlog of deferred maintenance that will eat a significant share of the city’s revenues and encounter a budget shortfall of more than 1 billion Canadian dollars.The candidate leading in some polls is Olivia Chow, a left-leaning, veteran politician, who lost to Mr. Tory in 2014 and has announced a plan to address affordable housing by having the city build and acquire more units. Vowing to “build a Toronto that’s caring, affordable and safe,” she has proposed to raise property taxes, without saying by how much.Entertainers at Ms. Chow’s campaign rally in June. Her supporters barely filled half of the banquet space in a neighborhood that is a stronghold for liberal voters, a possible sign of the splintering support among the large field of candidates.An efficient transit system, a sign of urban stability, was one of the reasons Toronto was considered “a city that works.”But The Toronto Star, the city’s biggest newspaper, and the former mayor, Mr. Tory, have endorsed Ana Bailão, a longtime councilor the paper has called a “pragmatic centrist.” Ms. Bailão has said she would keep property taxes low in a city that already has among the lowest in the province of Ontario.The disinvestment in city services increased with the populist plea of former Mayor Rob Ford to stop what he called the “gravy train” at City Hall. Years of austerity budgets by his successor, Mr. Tory, followed. Both mayors appealed to voters who believed Toronto did too much for downtown residents and not enough for the city’s outlying regions.Mr. Ford, whose four-year tenure ended with him admitting to smoking crack cocaine, found ways to reduce the budget by millions of dollars, including by changing service levels for a wide variety of city services and cutting city jobs.Among the issues most exasperating Toronto residents is the dearth of affordable housing. The average rent in Toronto reached a record high of more than 3,000 Canadian dollars per month, according to a recent report by Urbanation, a real estate analytics company. And the city has a subsidized housing wait list that is now 85,000 households deep.The issue has become such a third rail that among the 102 candidates, not a single one has stepped forward to be the voice of the small faction of wealthy residents who oppose affordable housing developments that increase density.Activists say bold policies, such as rezoning some major streets to build up density and reducing fees and taxes on affordable housing developers, are needed to make up for Canada’s limited building of subsidized housing projects in the last 25 years.“We are so phenomenally behind in our housing supply,” Ms. Keesmaat said. “Tinkering at the margins is not going to be how we house the next generation.”Jennifer Keesmaat, a former chief city planner who served under two Toronto mayors. “People are saying, enough already, you had your chance with the low taxes and the low level of investment,” she said.Toronto had a surge of refugees entering homeless shelters last month.The affordable housing crisis has been exacerbated by surges in the population, which grew by a record one million people as Canada raised its immigration targets. A large share of the newcomers landed in Toronto and surrounding suburbs.The city also had an influx of refugees entering homeless shelters last month, rising from 530 less than two years ago to 2,800.Ms. Chow has proposed to address affordable housing by having the city act as its own developer to build 25,000 rent-controlled homes in the next eight years, as well as by buying up market value properties and letting nonprofits manage them.Liberal voters are split over how to address the city’s issues, and the sheer number of candidates, including a handful of big names in local politics, is likely to splinter the vote to the center and right of the political spectrum.At Ms. Chow’s first campaign rally one week before the election, her supporters barely filled half of a banquet space in a commercial plaza in a neighborhood that is a stronghold for liberal voters.“I’m not very impressed about the turnout today,” said Warren Vigneswaran, 76. He said he was on the fence about voting for Ms. Chow, concerned his property taxes would rise. “But she’s a leading candidate, and her policies are better than anybody else,” he added.Liberal voters are split over how to address some of the city’s biggest issues, which include affordable housing. More

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      Mike Johnston Declares Victory in Denver’s Mayoral Election

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      Mr. Johnston, a former Colorado state senator, benefited from far more outside spending than his opponent, who conceded on Tuesday night.Mike Johnston, a former Colorado state senator buoyed by millions of dollars in outside spending, declared victory on Tuesday night in Denver’s mayoral election, beating out a candidate who had been vying to become the first woman to hold the office.As of 10 p.m., Mr. Johnston had pulled ahead with about 54 percent of the vote in the runoff contest, which is nonpartisan though both candidates are Democrats. His opponent, Kelly Brough, a former head of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, had about 46 percent. Ms. Brough conceded minutes later.Tens of thousands of ballots were still left to be counted as of Tuesday night, and the city said that the official results would not be released until later this month. But Mr. Johnston continued to hold a steady lead throughout the evening after polls closed.“We can build a city that is big enough keep all of us safe, to house all of us, to support all of us,” Mr. Johnston said in a victory speech on Tuesday night. “That is our dream of Denver.”Mr. Johnston, 48, and Ms. Brough, 59, had emerged as the top contenders from a crowded field of 16 candidates in the April general election to replace Mayor Michael B. Hancock, a Democrat who has been in office for 12 years. Term limits prevented him from running again.Both candidates had said that they wanted to make space for more affordable housing, invest in services for homeless people and improve diversity in police recruitment in Colorado’s capital city. But Mr. Johnston appeared to have more support from left-leaning voters, and from wealthy donors outside the state.Ms. Brough said in a speech that she had called Mr. Johnston to concede. “We set out to restore the promise of Denver,” she said. “And I still believe in this campaign, and the work we did.”A handful of more progressive candidates had considerable support from voters before the April 4 election, but they seemed to sap each other’s momentum as the first round of voting neared.Tami Matthews, 53, a marketing director, said she had voted for Mr. Johnston in the runoff because he seemed like a creative politician who was more progressive than Ms. Brough. She said she liked his support for more regulations to address climate change, as well as his plans to build small communities of tiny homes for the city’s homeless population.Denver voters had been excited about the idea of having a woman as mayor, Ms. Matthews said. “But I think that there were so many other better women candidates,” she added, mentioning progressive candidates who hadn’t made it past the April election.Still, she said she had voted for Mr. Johnston both times, even though she did not like the reports of his donations from out of state. “That does give me some heartburn,” Ms. Matthews said.In the 12 years under Mr. Hancock’s administration, Denver has seen major population growth — despite some losses during the coronavirus pandemic — and many of the challenges that come with it. Housing costs have risen, and homelessness has gotten worse.“Whoever wins I think will have, at least for a while, a fair mandate to make some pretty significant public policy shifts on these issues,” Seth Masket, the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, said in an interview before the early results were in. “I think a lot of other mayors of similar-size cities will be looking at Denver, just to see what comes out of this.”Mr. Johnston — a former teacher, principal and education adviser to President Barack Obama — was first elected to the State Senate in 2009 and served until 2017, when he reached his term limit. Since then, he has run unsuccessfully both for governor and for the United States Senate.More recently, he was the chief executive of Gary Community Ventures, an organization that combines philanthropy, investing and political funding. There, he played a leading role in advancing Proposition 123, an initiative to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars annually to providing affordable housing. It was approved by Colorado voters last year.Before serving as the chief executive of the city Chamber of Commerce, Ms. Brough was Denver’s head of human resources, and she served as chief of staff for former Mayor John Hickenlooper, who is now a U.S. senator.She was endorsed by Democratic leaders in the city and state, as well as the city’s police union and its Republican Party. But endorsements from some of the progressive candidates who were edged out of the April election bolstered Mr. Johnston’s chances in the runoff.His campaign also benefited from far more outside spending than did Ms. Brough’s, public records show.Advancing Denver, a super PAC that supported Mr. Johnston but was not formally affiliated with his campaign, received more than $2 million from donors including Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City.Both men also supported Mr. Johnston’s unsuccessful run for governor in 2018, The Colorado Sun reported.A Better Denver, a super PAC that supported Ms. Brough’s candidacy, was funded by donors including the National Association of Realtors, which spent more than $400,000.Although Tuesday was Election Day, votes for the runoff contest have been rolling in since last month. That is because registered voters in Denver receive their ballots in the mail, giving them the option to send it back, drop it off or show up in person to cast a ballot on Election Day. Ms. Brough dropped off her ballot last week, and Mr. Johnston submitted his on Sunday. More

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      Miami Mayor Suarez Eyes Presidential Run Amid City Hall Turmoil

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      Miami’s strong economy has its mayor weighing a presidential run. But a trial against a city commissioner has exposed some of the city’s less attractive inner workings.Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami has visited early primary states in recent weeks, mulling a Republican presidential run built on the premise that his in-vogue city has boomed in difficult times — “the Miami miracle,” he calls it. Techies have flocked to the city from San Francisco. Bankers from New York. Taxes — and the murder rate — are low.It makes for a rosy story, not untrue.At the same time, a very different story about Miami unfolded recently in a drama-filled civil trial against a city commissioner who was accused by a pair of businessmen of violating their First Amendment rights by siccing inspectors on their bars and restaurants as political retribution. Testimony from a parade of former public employees portrayed City Hall as a toxic workplace, rife with dysfunction.On Thursday, a jury ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, holding the commissioner, Joe Carollo, liable for more than $63 million in damages.Miami has long been a city of confounding narratives, the airbrushed image it projects to outsiders often obscuring the complicated realities that lie beneath. But these days, the contrast between the Miami brand and the goings-on at City Hall seems especially stark.Under the city’s shiny postpandemic hood lie the inner workings of a local government mired in turmoil. The trial and its revelations came at a pivotal moment, as Miami teems with new residents whose arrival has put pressure on services, housing and roadways, and as Mayor Suarez, who took office in 2017, considers trying to leverage the city’s popularity to run for higher office.The mayor was not implicated in the trial, but a national campaign would bring new scrutiny to the problems at City Hall under his watch, a reminder that Miami has never been as easy to summarize as its marketing pitch.“Miami is not the glamorous place that everybody believes,” said Manolo Reyes, a city commissioner who was not the one on trial. “We have problems, and we have to solve those problems and tackle them head on.”Miami has low taxes compared with other major cities, but it also consistently has one of the highest rates of income inequality.Lynne Sladky/Associated PressThere are troubling signs beyond the trial. A federal judge ordered the city last month to draw new commission districts after finding that commissioners — there are five who make up the city’s legislative body — racially gerrymandered the boundaries last year. Last week, a former spokesman for Mr. Suarez pleaded guilty to receiving sexually explicit photographs from a 16-year-old boy after first meeting him in City Hall in 2019.In April, two Black officers filed a whistle-blower case against the Miami Police Department, saying that they faced discrimination and retaliation after reporting corruption. In January, a retiring police sergeant used her radio sign-off to blast the chief for having “destroyed” the department.Mr. Suarez — who will face Gov. Ron DeSantis, with whom he has openly disagreed at times, if he enters the Republican primary — does have some data points to brag about: Wages and salaries have risen more sharply than in most other major metropolitan areas. The unemployment rate is lower than the national average. The real estate market remains buoyant, if somewhat less so than during the pandemic frenzy, a contrast with recent downturns in other big cities.“I focus on the results, and the results are very clear,” said Mr. Suarez, a 45-year-old Cuban American and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said in a recent interview. “That speaks to the Miami model being a working model that’s scalable across urban America.”But Miami also ranks as one of the nation’s most unaffordable cities for housing. It consistently has one of the highest rates of income inequality.At City Hall, spending has stalled on a $400 million bond that voters approved in 2017 to address widespread flooding, the lack of affordable housing and other infrastructure problems. The Police Department is on its third chief in three years. The city attorney and her relatives are facing questions on whether firms they owned or helped runfinancially benefited from a county-run program that is now under investigation.Joe Carollo, a Miami city commissioner, speaking during a commission meeting last year.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesAfter repeatedly clashing with the city commissioners, who among other things pushed out his police chief in 2021, Mr. Suarez pivoted and worked on raising his profile. He found a niche posting online videos about his recovery from Covid and later promoting the city, famously responding to a venture capitalist who in 2020 suggested moving Silicon Valley to Miami by posting on Twitter, “How can I help?”He also heavily promoted cryptocurrency, calling Miami the “crypto capital of the world,” before it collapsed last year.Mr. Suarez has come under heightened scrutiny after a series of revelations by The Miami Herald involving his failure to disclose financial interests, including that a developer paid him at least $170,000 over the past two years to help with a $70 million project.“I don’t know why my local paper is obsessed with how many jobs I do,” he said on the CBS Sunday news program “Face the Nation.” “I think they should be focused on the job of being mayor, which I think I do a great job at.”Mr. Suarez, who is in his second and final term, has declined to disclose his consulting clients. He receives compensation of about $130,000 for his part-time job as mayor, though his power — and, critics argue, any credit he can claim — is limited: He has no commission vote but can veto legislation and hire and fire the city manager. (A separate mayor and commission run Miami-Dade County, a far larger government whose mayor does have broad executive powers.)Former Mayor Tomás Regalado, Mr. Suarez’s predecessor and a fellow Republican, who is considering running for mayor again, called Miami “ethically challenged.”“The city is going through a very difficult situation in terms of governance, because you have a city commission in which every commissioner believes that they are the mayor and manager,” he said. “And you have an absent mayor.”Ball & Chain, a popular bar and nightclub in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, is co-owned by a plaintiff in the case against Mr. Carollo.Scott Baker for The New York TimesThe trial pitted Mr. Carollo, a city commissioner and former mayor, against two businessmen, Bill Fuller and Martin Pinilla, who said that Mr. Carollo “weaponized” the code enforcement department against them because they backed Mr. Carollo’s opponent in 2017.Mr. Carollo, a Republican who at 68 has been a bombastic figure in Miami politics for decades, countered that his actions were intended to preserve residents’ quality of life and ensure that the plaintiffs’ properties, some of which had fallen into disrepair, were safe and operating with proper permits. One night, it was noted during the trial, one of their bars was found to be running an illegal boxing ring.Mr. Fuller and Mr. Pinilla have extensive property holdings in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood; Mr. Fuller co-owns Ball & Chain, a popular bar and nightclub. The plaintiffs’ lawyer said that their businesses had been cited for code violations 84 times. One business was forced to move and another to close.The jury held Mr. Carollo liable for $15.9 million in compensatory damages and $47.6 million in punitive damages.The trial, which began in April, was full of outlandish accusations and startling anecdotes, including that Mr. Carollo patrolled the plaintiffs’ properties late at night and wanted an aide to secretly measure the distance from one of their businesses to a church, looking for grounds to revoke a liquor license.Mr. Carollo, who took the stand for several days, called the plaintiffs’ witnesses — including a former city manager, three former police chiefs and several former aides to Mr. Carollo — liars with personal “gripes.”“I’d put my record against anyone in the city,” he said.In the recent interview, Mr. Suarez was dismissive of the trial. “It’s typical for the press to focus on things that are negative,” he said.The city spent at least $1.9 million on legal fees to defend Mr. Carollo, who could appeal Thursday’s verdict. But a more serious case looms for City Hall: The corporate entity that owns the Ball & Chain nightclub has filed a separate lawsuit against the city, not the commissioner, for $28 million in business losses.That trial is pending. More

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      Eric Adams’s Criticism of Biden Angers Aides and Reveals Democratic Rift

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      The New York mayor has loudly blamed President Biden for an influx of migrants, amplifying concerns many Democrats share but irritating Mr. Biden’s aides and weakening his political position.The Democratic Party is following a standard strategy as President Biden seeks re-election: Do not criticize him publicly under any circumstances, lest it help Donald J. Trump or one of his acolytes take back the White House for Republicans.The one Democrat who appears to have missed the memo is Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.Mr. Adams has taken nearly every opportunity in recent weeks to publicly blame Mr. Biden or his administration for the influx of migrants to New York from border states, many of them on buses dispatched by Republican governors.His eagerness to point a finger at the White House has infuriated top Biden aides, who note the issue’s global complexity. At the same time, the mayor is using his platform to amplify concerns many Democrats share but will not articulate publicly because they don’t want to hurt the president.The recent schism comes as Republicans make Mr. Biden’s immigration policy central to their efforts to dislodge him in 2024. After many Democratic candidates last year successfully used abortion rights against their Republican opponents, Mr. Biden’s nascent campaign would prefer that his allies stay on message — something Mr. Adams has shown scant willingness to do, despite once calling himself “the Biden of Brooklyn.”Migrants in California waiting to be processed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. New York and other major cities have had an influx of migrants from the southern border.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesOfficials in New York and Washington insist that the ideologically aligned president and mayor have no personal animus toward each other. But as Mr. Adams has struggled to manage the waves of migrants being sent to New York, he has been more vocal than other mayors in the same situation — and more willing to blame Mr. Biden.Mr. Adams said on Wednesday that it was “baffling” that Washington officials “are not understanding what this is doing to New York City.” He expressed similar sentiments last month, saying, “The president and the White House have failed New York City on this issue.”Mr. Adams and his allies say the White House has ignored many of their entreaties, including their request that the federal government give more asylum seekers access to work permits and develop a plan to more broadly distribute migrants across the nation.“We have reached out to the White House on a number of occasions and stated clearly the things we need,” Mr. Adams said Wednesday. “Allow people to work, which I believe that’s one of the No. 1 things we can do. Allow people to work. And do a decompression strategy at the border. We got 108,000 cities and towns and villages. Why aren’t we spreading this out throughout the entire country?”Since becoming mayor 17 months ago on a platform of taming disorder on city streets, Mr. Adams has repeatedly broken ranks with the Democratic Party. Last year, his language on crime mirrored attacks by New York Republicans as they helped flip the House and mounted a strong challenge to Gov. Kathy Hochul.Now, some Democrats worry that Mr. Adams’s messaging on migrants will again undercut Mr. Biden, placing the president at odds with a high-profile ally and seeming to strengthen the arguments of Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida that he is weak on border security.“Abbott and DeSantis and whoever are getting what they want: They got everybody at each other’s throats,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime Adams ally who has tried to serve as a middleman between the mayor and the White House. “On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 12 in frustration, and sometimes in frustration it can come off as more adversarial than you would like.”Some Democrats worry that Mr. Adams’s messaging on migrants will be a useful tool for Republicans to weaken Mr. Biden.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Biden’s aides and allies in Washington — a half dozen of whom spoke about their private discussions on the condition of anonymity — are clearly irritated with the mayor. In their view, Mr. Adams is a grandstanding opportunist, aiming to win headlines for himself without regard to the broader political implications for the president and his re-election.Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, said in a statement that “Mayor Adams has and always will put the interest of New Yorkers first and foremost, and that’s why we’ve been asking for support for a year.” He added, “We desperately need federal and state support more than ever to quickly manage this crisis.”Last year, some White House officials were annoyed when Mr. Adams released a public letter asking for more monkeypox vaccines and calling the White House’s approach “piecemeal” after it had already told Mr. Adams privately that he would receive the vaccine shipments he had requested.When Mr. Abbott began busing migrants to New York from Texas border towns, Mr. Adams and his team asked the White House for federal support to house migrants, expedite their work permits and move some of them to cruise ships in the city’s harbor. The administration would often reply that many of the mayor’s requests required congressional action — which was unlikely, given the gridlock at the Capitol.On multiple occasions, White House officials told the mayor’s staff that they hoped to continue talking about the issues privately and emphasized the need to move forward as a partnership. Instead, Mr. Adams continued to criticize the administration in public.“He should be looking at Republicans who are purposely causing chaos for their political benefit and refusing to take any action to fix the issue,” said Pili Tobar, a former Biden administration deputy communications director who dealt with immigration.Mr. Biden introduced legislation that would overhaul the immigration system, increasing funding for border security and providing citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants. But Republicans have uniformly opposed the proposals, and they have gone nowhere.The mayor has his own calculations to make. While New York City has long prided itself on being a haven for migrants, more than 67,000 have traveled there in the past year. The city is also unique among major American cities in its legal requirement to shelter people with nowhere to live. Already facing record homelessness, the city is now housing roughly 42,400 migrants. It has run out of room at its shelters and has begun scouting alternative locations.New York has sent migrants upstate while continuing to pay for their housing and services, temporarily housed migrants in public school gyms and floated ideas like putting tents in Central Park. The Adams administration even asked an owner of the mostly vacant Flatiron Building if there was room there. (He said no.)Homeland Security officials in the Biden administration also privately expressed concerns last year about how cities would handle the influx of migrants from Texas and Florida.Last summer, those officials acknowledged that New York City and Washington were already struggling, even with additional volunteers, to process hundreds of migrants bused to their cities, according to internal emails reviewed by The New York Times.More than 67,000 migrants have come to New York City in the past year.Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesThe Homeland Security Department was considering a plan in which the federal government would coordinate with local officials to fly migrants to cities, rather than releasing them along the border, and leave Mr. Abbott to continue orchestrating the surprise drop-offs.Supporters of such government-funded flights believed they would alleviate overcrowding at the border and allow federal officials to finish the processing of migrants once they landed. But some thought there were not enough federal resources to complete the plan.The administration instead moved ahead with an “Interior Cities Awareness Campaign,” in which the government would educate city leaders on migrants’ rights and immigration processing — but would leave municipalities to handle the drop-offs of migrants. The Biden administration has made $350 million in federal grants available to local governments grappling with the arrival of migrants; New York received $30 million.The Adams administration says that, beyond the organizational difficulties, the migrants’ arrival will blow a $4.3 billion hole in the city budget, which was already threatened by the decline of the commercial real estate market.Frank Carone, Mr. Adams’s former chief of staff, who is expected to lead the mayor’s re-election campaign, said it was “entirely appropriate for colleagues” to disagree on how to handle immigration.“I would contrast that to what goes on in an oligarch state, like in Russia or China or North Korea, where I doubt very much you’re going to see dissent from Putin’s allies,” Mr. Carone said. “The president and his team realize they’re in a humanitarian crisis. And he’s doing the best he can. Unfortunately, it is falling squarely on the shoulders of New York City.”What makes Mr. Adams’s approach so politically noteworthy — and appealing to Republicans — is that, while he is hardly the only Democrat to argue that Mr. Biden is not properly handling immigration, he is the rare one to do so repeatedly in front of television cameras.Mr. Adams’s repeated criticism of the White House has raised his national profile — no small concern for a man whose three predecessors ran for president. His potshots appear regularly on Fox News and in other conservative news outlets, with a clear message: Even the mayor of liberal New York City has had it with Mr. Biden.The mayor’s outspokenness has earned him the enmity of officials in the White House. Last week he was conspicuously absent from the Biden campaign’s list of surrogates, which included the mayors of Cincinnati; Richmond, Va.; and Madison, Wis.How much political benefit Mr. Adams can gain by attacking Mr. Biden is another question.Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat, said the mayor’s “sentiment is understandable and his grievance against the federal government strikes me as legitimate.”He added: “Do I wish he were more careful in his word choice? Sure.” More

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      Democrat Donna Deegan Wins Jacksonville’s Mayor Race in Florida Upset

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      Donna Deegan is only the second Democrat to be elected mayor of Florida’s biggest city in the past three decades.MIAMI — Donna Deegan, a Democrat, was elected mayor of Jacksonville on Tuesday, shaking up the politics of Florida’s largest city, where Republican mayors have been in power for all but four of the last 30 years.Ms. Deegan, a former television news anchor, defeated Daniel Davis, a Republican endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had been seen as the likely favorite in the traditionally Republican stronghold. In recent years, Jacksonville had been the most populous city in the country with a Republican mayor, Lenny Curry, who is term-limited; that distinction now goes to Fort Worth, Texas.Ms. Deegan’s victory is a rare bright spot for Florida Democrats, whose losses have mounted in recent elections to the point that the party has little sway in the State Capitol and a thin candidate bench.But while Florida has become decidedly more Republican — and while many have viewed Mr. DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, as all-powerful in state politics — Jacksonville has emerged as a swingy corner of the state. A majority of voters in Duval County, which shares a consolidated government with the city of Jacksonville, voted for the Democratic nominee for governor in 2018, for the Republican mayor in 2019, for President Biden in 2020, for Mr. DeSantis last year, and now for Ms. Deegan, who will be the city’s first female mayor.“We made history tonight,” Ms. Deegan told cheering supporters Tuesday night after Mr. Davis conceded.Mr. Davis, the chief executive of the local chamber of commerce, out-raised Ms. Deegan by a margin of four to one and seemed like the sort of business-friendly Republican that has long dominated elections in Jacksonville.Corey Perrine/The Florida Times-Union, via Associated PressMs. Deegan campaigned as a change candidate, leaning into the relationships she had made in the community as she overcame breast cancer three times while working on television and as she later created the Donna Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps people diagnosed with breast cancer.“I made a decision when we got into this race that, no matter what happened, no matter what the landscape was like, we were going to lead with love over fear,” Ms. Deegan said Tuesday night. “We would not go with division. We would go with unity.”Mr. Davis, the chief executive of the local chamber of commerce, out-raised Ms. Deegan by a margin of four to one and seemed like the sort of business-friendly Republican that has long dominated elections in Jacksonville, a Navy and shipping town. Mr. Curry, the outgoing mayor, was previously the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.Mr. Davis was known as more of a moderate when he was a state lawmaker, and as the leader of JAX Chamber he supported positions such as protections for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. But as a mayoral candidate, he campaigned from the political right, promising to promote causes espoused by the conservative group Moms for Liberty, which is closely aligned with Mr. DeSantis. He also pledged to be tough on crime in a city that has struggled with stubbornly high crime rates for years, including under Republican leadership.In advertisements, Mr. Davis and other Republicans cast Ms. Deegan as “radical” for backing demonstrators after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 — though Mr. Curry and other local Republicans also supported the protests at the time.On Tuesday night, Mr. Davis said he would be willing to help Ms. Deegan for the good of the city. “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure Mayor-elect Deegan is successful in making Jacksonville the best Jacksonville it can be,” he said. The city has a strong-mayor form of government, giving the mayor broad administrative powers.Mr. DeSantis, who won Duval County by an 11 percentage-point margin in November, did not endorse Mr. Davis until late March — after Mr. Davis had already been forced into Tuesday’s runoff against Ms. Deegan.Beyond his lukewarm endorsement, which took place via Twitter on a Friday afternoon, Mr. DeSantis offered Mr. Davis little support. The governor did not visit Jacksonville to campaign, unlike one of Florida’s other top Republicans, Senator Rick Scott, who spent last weekend knocking on voters’ doors.In 2020, Ms. Deegan lost a congressional race by 22 percentage points. On Wednesday morning, unofficial results showed she had won about 52 percent of the vote, compared with Mr. Davis’s 48 percent, a difference of about 9,000 votes. Turnout was about 33 percent.Though 39 percent of Duval County voters are registered Democrats, compared with 35 percent registered Republicans and 24 percent registered without party affiliation, Republican voters outnumbered Democratic ones by about 3.5 percentage points on Tuesday — meaning that Ms. Deegan won independents and crossover Republican votes.Five other Jacksonville Democrats were elected on Tuesday, one as property appraiser and four to the City Council.Ashley Walker, a political consultant for Ms. Deegan, said that campaigning on local issues and with a candidate who connected well with voters were key to flipping Jacksonville from red to blue.“Democrats in Florida have to eat the elephant piece by piece,” she said. “We have to go win in these local areas that are purple and get down to the base of some local campaigns to have any chance of coming back statewide.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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      The Spectacular Fall of Lori Lightfoot

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      It was a stunning rebuke. On Tuesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, the first Black woman and first openly L.G.B.T.Q. person to lead the city, failed to advance to a runoff, earning just 17 percent of the vote and becoming the first incumbent mayor in 40 years to lose a re-election bid.Four days before the election, I interviewed Lightfoot in her Chicago office. The space, with its soaring ceiling, was a clash of aesthetics, like many government buildings, displaying a kind of prudent grandeur, evoking the gravitas of the office without signaling excess, much like Lightfoot herself, who settled her small frame, dressed in a smart gray suit, into a large chair.During our nearly hourlong interview, she choked up and fought back tears when discussing the sacrifices her parents had made for her and her siblings. A smile lit her face when she talked about all the memes that had made her a folk hero in the early days of her term, and she puffed up with pride when discussing her proudest moments as mayor, including how she and her team had dealt with the Covid-19 crisis.But those weren’t the reasons I’d trekked to the frigid city on the lake. I’d come because Lightfoot belongs to a group of recently elected Black mayors of major American cities, including Eric Adams in New York, Sylvester Turner in Houston and Karen Bass in Los Angeles.In those cities, Black people are outnumbered by other nonwhite groups, and in New York City and Chicago their ranks are dwindling.Each of these four mayors was elected or re-elected around the height of two seismic cultural phenomena — Black Lives Matter and the pandemic. Of the four, Lightfoot would be one of the first to face voters and test the fallout. (Turner is term-limited and can’t run again.)It clearly did not go well.On one level, the results of Tuesday’s election speak to how potent the issue of crime can be and how it can be used as a scare tactic. Lightfoot said that it was absolutely used as a political tool in her race: “You’ve got people who are using it as a cudgel against me every single day. You’ve got the only white candidate in the race who’s acting like he’s going to be a great white savior on public safety.”That white candidate is Paul Vallas, who finished at the top of the crowded field on Tuesday with 34 percent of the vote. Vallas had run a tough-on-crime, law-and-order campaign in which he told one crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.”Lightfoot called the remark “the ultimate dog whistle.”In our interview, she was brutal in her racial assessment of Vallas: “He is giving voice and platform to people who are hateful of anyone who isn’t white and Republican in our city, in our country.” She is also surprisingly candid about how race operates in the city itself: “Chicago is a deeply divided and segregated city.”It is that division, in her view, fomented by candidates who see politics in the city as a zero-sum game, that provided Vallas with an opening to win over the city’s white citizens. As she put it, “People who are not used to feeling the touch of violence, particularly people on the North Side of our city, they are buying what he’s selling.”Indeed, Vallas won many of the wards in the northern part of the city, while Lightfoot won most of the wards on the largely Black South Side.But two things can be true simultaneously: There can be legitimate concerns about rising crime, and crime can be used as a political wedge issue, particularly against elected officials of color, which has happened often.In this moment, when the country has still not come to grips with the wide-ranging societal trauma that the pandemic exacerbated and unleashed, mayors are being held responsible for that crime. If all politics is local, crime and safety are the most local. And when the perception of crime collides with ingrained societal concepts of race and gender, politicians, particularly Black women, can pay the price.In 2021, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta chose not to seek re-election, becoming the city’s first Black mayor to serve only a single term, after wrestling with what she called the “Covid crime wave.” Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans is facing a possible recall, largely over the issue of crime in her city, and organizers said this week that they have gathered enough signatures to force a recall vote.Even in cities where Black mayors aren’t likely to be removed from office, their opponents are searching for ways to limit their power, using criminal justice as justification.The Mississippi House recently passed a bill that would create a separate court system and an expanded police force in the city of Jackson, one of the Blackest cities in America. The new district “would incorporate all of the city’s significantly populated white-majority neighborhoods,” as an analysis by The Guardian pointed out. Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, said the plan reminded him of apartheid.Crime often comes in waves, but a question lingers about how people, even liberals, respond when a crest arrives under Black leadership: Are Black mayors too quickly and easily blamed for rising crime, and if so, why? Because of an unwillingness to crack down on criminals or because of a more insidious, latent belief in ineffectual Black leadership in times of crisis?Lightfoot told me she understood that as a woman and as a person of color, “I’m always going to be viewed through a different lens, that the things I do and say, that the toughness that I exhibit, is viewed as divisive, that I’m the mean mayor, that I can’t collaborate with anyone.”Even so, she conceded, “If you feel like your life has been challenged because of the public safety issues coming to your doorstep, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are — you need to feel safe.”But feelings on issues of politics, crime and race also tap into our biases, both conscious and subconscious. In that vein, Lightfoot may be a harbinger, or at least a warning, for the other big-city Black mayors: As the Covid crime wave wears on, will their mostly non-Black citizens feel that their safety is being prioritized and secured under Black leadership?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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More