A competitive and costly race for City Council is unfolding on Manhattan’s East Side, where six candidates are vying to represent a well-heeled district that contains some of New York’s most important real estate.
District 4 covers a sliver of the Upper East Side between Fifth and Third avenues; continues south along Broadway to encompass much of Central and East Midtown; and hews along the East River further downtown to cover Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village. Incumbent Keith Powers is term-limited after eight years in office and is running for Manhattan borough president.
A slate of well-connected candidates are in contention to replace him: Virginia Maloney, a tech executive and daughter of former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney; Ben Wetzler, a state housing official; Vanessa Aronson, a former diplomat and executive at the ASPCA; Rachel Storch, chief operating officer of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue and a former Missouri state legislator; and Faith Bondy, an attorney and schools advocate. (A sixth candidate, Luke Florczak, has raised far less money.)
Whoever wins the June 24 Democratic primary could be at the table for high-stakes decisions about the future of Midtown’s office buildings or renovations to Grand Central Terminal. Powers, the incumbent, said the fact that District 4 includes both the Midtown office district and residential neighborhoods forces the local member to focus on typical constituent services as well as citywide issues like tourism and the commercial real estate market.
“You have to attend to the needs of the entire city alongside the needs within your specific district,” Powers said in an interview. “You have a lot of work on your hands to make sure you can do all those things.”
The seat has also served as a springboard to political prominence. Powers spent two years as the council’s majority leader; his predecessors in District 4 include Dan Garodnick, who now serves as City Planning Director, and Eva Moskowitz, who went on to become a prominent charter school executive.
The race is already being shaped by Storch’s decision to opt out of the city’s matching funds program, which amplifies small-dollar donations by multiplying city residents’ contributions eight-to-one. Under city rules, the $228,000 limit that candidates were allowed to spend before the June 24 primary has been increased to $342,000, since Storch has raised far more than half of the initial cap. The cap will vanish entirely if Storch raises or spends three times the old limit — resulting in a high-spending affair that will inundate voters with campaign fliers.
Several other candidates have criticized Storch’s decision, which is unusual though not unheard-of. Storch told Crain’s that she supports the matching funds program but made “a strategic decision” to opt out, believing that she could raise more from private donors to help spread her message.
“I wanted to make sure that voters would know my name when they got to the polling place,” she said.
The decision has seemingly paid off for Storch, who leads the pack with $369,000 raised as of mid-March thanks to donations from the likes of developer Charles Kushner and investor Glenn Furhman. Maloney, Aronson, Wetzler and Bondy follow with a respective $302,000, $267,000, $257,000 and $250,000 in combined public and private funds.
E-bikes and housing
In interviews, the five leading candidates expressed similar policy views centered on affordability and safe streets; both Storch and Bondy hit centrist notes by emphasizing they want to “fully fund” the NYPD. All candidates said they support the recent City of Yes zoning changes but want to build more affordable housing, including through office conversions — which are likely to accelerate in District 4 if the Midtown South rezoning is approved later this year.
Wetzler in particular is campaigning on housing. An assistant policy director at the state’s Division of Homes and Community Renewal and a self-described “big geek,” he said he would propose a “full-throated and enthusiastic agenda” for reforming the city’s planning process in office, including measures to reduce tenant costs and develop neighborhood growth plans. He has the backing of Open New York, a pro-development group that plans to spend $500,000 to boost him and a handful of other council candidates.
Aronson has the notable endorsement of the progressive Working Families Party but said her campaign has no strict ideological focus. Also a former public school teacher, Aronson previously ran for the same seat in 2017 and said she would push for office conversions, fight the deregulation of affordable units, and propose a suite of government ethics reforms such as banning campaign donations by city contractors.
“I’m focused on making sure that our streets and our communities are safe, are clean, that our human rights are protected in the age of the federal government trying to take away what New Yorkers value,” she said.
Bondy said she is campaigning to reverse a recent decline in the city’s quality of life, pointing to anti-Semitism and the “scourge of e-vehicles on our street.” A self-described “doer,” she said she would push for stricter enforcement of e-bikes and combating retail theft.
Storch, too, emphasized e-bikes and anti-Semitism, as well as subway safety — saying she would advocate to fund mobile mental health treatment units like those run by the nonprofit Project Renewal. She pointed to her six-year stint representing St. Louis in the Missouri House of Representatives, which preceded her move to Manhattan 15 years ago.
“As somebody who was an urban, progressive legislator, I know how to fight these fights,” she said.
Maloney, finally, is a product manager at Meta and former executive for the city’s Economic Development Corp. She called public service “a way of life” in her family, pointing to her mother’s decades spent in Congress and the City Council, and said she was motivated to run herself by the Trump administration’s “rollbacks of hard-earned rights.” Maloney has the backing of the New Majority PAC, an influential group devoted to increasing the number of women in office.
Maloney said she would push for community policing and echoed calls for tightening e-bike regulations. She said she would use her tech background to analyze where crashes have occurred and what kinds of bikes should be restricted.
Powers, who won the seat in 2017 after a competitive primary, has had an eventful tenure in office that has coincided with a building boom brought about by that year’s Midtown East rezoning. He has stayed neutral in the race to succeed him but predicted that the winner will be decided less by fundraising than by old-fashioned campaigning.
“At the end of the day it really is who can go and talk to the most voters,” he said.
Only a handful of the city’s 51 council districts feature competitive races this year, since most incumbents are able to seek re-election. Other open seats include Carlina Rivera’s in Lower Manhattan, Justin Brannan’s in South Brooklyn and Adrienne Adams’ in Southeast Queens.
