In State of the City speech, Adams pushes plans for more housing, closing illegal weed shops and boosting jobs in NYC

In his third State of the City speech since taking office, Mayor Adams pledged Wednesday that the remainder of his term will be focused on boosting job creation, education, housing development and public safety — but he acknowledged that he needs help from Albany lawmakers to achieve several of those goals.

Adams’ speech, delivered at Hostos Community College in the Bronx, featured victory laps for previously announced initiatives, an emphasis on quality-of-life issues and a handful of new city-level policy prescriptions. Those new policies include a plan to create a Tenant Protection Cabinet tasked with guarding against hostile landlords, a push to build about 12,000 units of affordable housing on city land, the creation and refurbishment of several local skate parks and a directive designating social media as a public health crisis. He also repeated what’s become a signature phrase: “Crime down. Jobs up.”

“Our strategy is working,” he said.

He also made a new commitment for the city to have a total of 5 million jobs in 2025, a milestone he said isn’t projected to be reached until 2026.

“I know we can defy expectations, so I’m charging us with getting there a year ahead of schedule,” the mayor said in the college’s packed auditorium on the Grand Concourse.

The city currently has about 4.7 million private and public sector jobs. Adams didn’t lay out any specific new initiatives that would propel job creation to reach the 5 million target next year and details about his new policy on addressing social media were thin as of Wednesday afternoon.

On another economic front, Adams said he’s in talks with the City Council to establish a new agency called the Department of Sustainable Delivery that would regulate trucks, electric bicycles, scooters and mopeds in the city’s ballooning commercial delivery sector. Use of those vehicles has surged since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic amid an uptick in New Yorkers relying on delivery services for food and packages. But exactly what that new agency would look like was also unclear.

Several of the proposals laid out in Adams’ speech would require action from Albany.

That includes a push to amend state law to allow the city to more easily shutter the hundreds of unlicensed weed shops that have cropped up across the five boroughs since New York legalized recreational cannabis in 2021.

“We need Albany’s help,” he said. “Give us the proper authority and we will get the job done.”

He also turned to Albany for help on housing development.

During Adams’ time in the mayor’s office, the city has seen a dramatic spike in the cost of housing, with the average rent in Manhattan now 30% higher as compared with 2019, studies show.

Adams argued the skyrocketing housing costs are the result of a dearth of supply — and said state lawmakers this year must renew a version of 421-a, an expired measure that gave developers tax breaks in exchange for making some units in their buildings affordable.

“New York City must build. We need Albany to clear the way for the housing we need,” Adams said.

Adams’ plea for a new 421-a program has the backing of Gov. Hochul, but many progressive Democrats in the state Legislature dislike the proposal, arguing it’s a giveaway to deep-pocketed developers. Progressives have said they won’t consider a 421-a renewal without beefed-up tenant protections, a compromise Hochul opposed during last year’s legislative session.

The mayor also turned to Albany on the issue of education.

Although he didn’t roll out any new education initiatives as part of his speech, Adams said Albany must give him four more years of mayoral control, the mechanism that allows City Hall to control the Big Apple’s public schools.

Adams’ authority expires in June, and if Albany doesn’t renew it before then, the city’s public schools fall under state control. Hochul supports Adams’ request for a renewal of mayoral control, but some teachers, parent groups and lawmakers have questioned its effectiveness and demanded a more representative structure, including more checks and balances on the mayor through school boards or other elected officials.

Before his address, Adams’ team played a video entitled, “The Blue-Collar Mayor Who Is Getting Stuff Done.” The hype video featured some of Adams’ political allies, including U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-Manhattan, Bronx) and Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar (D-Queens), listing off some of the statistical benchmarks of his administration, like a decrease in some crime categories in 2023 as compared with 2022.

“Our city has gotten safer,” Adams said in his speech, noting that the NYPD has taken 14,000 illegal guns off the streets since he took over the reins at City Hall in January 2022.

Notably, the speech comes a year ahead of his reelection run — a race in which he could face a challenge from one or more fellow Democrats. It also comes as he’s staring down severe headwinds on several policy fronts.

Fellow elected officials have become increasingly vocal in calling Adams out for his public safety agenda, with City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) vowing to override his vetoes of bills that aim to ban solitary confinement in city jails and better document low-level NYPD stops. City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams has called Adams’ rhetoric around those bills “deceptive” and has likened him to former President Donald Trump several times.

At one point during the speech, Adams tried to extend an olive branch to the speaker, calling her his “sister,” telling her he loves her and “that there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“We’re going to navigate New York City out of the crises that we’re facing,” he told the speaker.

In a statement hours after the speech, Speaker Adams called some of the mayor’s proposals, notably on housing and street safety, “important” for New Yorkers, but said that the postpandemic recovery remains unequal across the city.

“The Council looks forward to working collaboratively on these critical issues,” Speaker Adams said.

The mayor has weathered sustained attacks over his handling of the migrant crisis as well, especially around rules his administration instituted to push migrants out of city-operated shelters — a move city Comptroller Brad Lander has described as “cruel.”

The speaker, Williams and Lander were all on hand for Wednesday’s speech in the Bronx to see what the mayor has in store next.

But the mayor barely touched on the migrant crisis in his speech, other than to renew calls for more federal funding and overhauling laws to make it easier for new arrivals to obtain work authorization.

Also present during Wednesday’s speech were dozens of protesters who gathered outside the auditorium to denounce him for cuts to city libraries, schools and pre-K as well as for what they described as prioritizing “policing and jails over care and community safety.”

Samy Feliz, whose brother Allan Feliz was killed by an NYPD officer in 2019, repeatedly lashed the mayor for lying to voters and for not sticking to his campaign vow to hold the NYPD accountable.

“Let me be clear and simple: Mayor Adams is using the city budget to shield cops from discipline, and he is lying to New Yorkers,” Feliz said through a bullhorn. “Mayor Adams has been lying since the campaign trail, and his promise of police accountability and transparency — he has not delivered.”

The mayor also took heat for this choice of venue, given recent cuts to the City University of New York.

“The state of CUNY is NOT strong right now,” said James Davis, president of the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents CUNY faculty. “Since the mayor came into office, CUNY colleges have cut courses, enacted hiring freezes, increased enrollment caps on classes and laid off [union] members in adjunct and full-time contingent titles. He has enacted and proposed cuts to community colleges totaling $94 million.”

The mayor faces several other challenges as well.

There’s the budget, which the mayor took heat for after his team initially lowballed the city’s incoming revenue estimates amid deep and controversial cuts to city agencies. And there are his record-low approval ratings and a federal investigation into his campaign’s ties to Turkey.