With early voting in the June primary just a month away, voters will soon rank their top five choices for who they want to be the next mayor of New York City.
THE CITY, in partnership with Gothamist, surveyed candidates starting in March, asking them to make tough decisions about the city’s most pressing issues – from affordability and housing development to local-federal partnership and closing Rikers Island.
Some candidates have taken positions on key issues for the first time, while others did not take positions on certain questions at all. Voters can now answer the same questions candidates did by taking our 2025 Meet Your Mayor quiz to help figure out which candidates they want to rank starting in June.
Here are some notable takeaways from the quiz, based on candidates’ responses:
Cuomo Says: Pause Shutting Down Rikers
Even with the recent appointment of a remediation manager to keep the Department of Correction on course with much-needed reforms on Rikers Island, the city’s leaders will still be responsible for following a law that requires shutting down the jail complex by 2027, and for shepherding the construction of four new borough-based jails, whose price tag is $15.5 billion and counting.
But construction is years behind the deadline and the current population of more than 7,000 exceeds the planned jails’ capacity. So Meet Your Mayor asked candidates to choose from three paths: release more people pretrial, keep a Rikers facility open while moving forward with the new jails, or pause the new jail project.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo chose the last path, declaring he wants to pause the planning of the new jails and work with the City Council to reinvest in facilities already on the island.
“We need to face the facts that the new borough jails will not be completed in time to close Rikers by 2027,” he said in a statement.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who previously helped to push close-Rikers legislation through the City Council, skipped the question entirely.
She said in a statement that “everyone has acknowledged the plan is delayed and will go beyond 2027,” and that “we must safely reduce the inflated population by creating the mental health infrastructure that helps move the approximately half of those on Rikers with mental illness to more appropriate settings.”
No One Wants to Scale Back the NYPD
“Defund the Police” was a rallying cry during the 2020 protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, and in the first edition of Meet Your Mayor the following year, seven candidates — including Scott Stringer, who is again a candidate for mayor — said they agreed with the proposition “Redirect a substantial share of NYPD operating resources to other city agencies.”
That was then. For 2025, not a single candidate said they want to “Scale back the police force and focus on improving New Yorkers’ economic prosperity and access to public goods.”
This time, Stringer swung to the other end of the spectrum, joining Cuomo, Zellnor Myrie and Whitney Tilson in choosing “Increase the size of the police force and ramp up enforcement of quality-of-life violations as well as more serious crimes.”
“In 2020 and 2021, New Yorkers were justifiably demanding real police accountability — and I continue to believe we must hold the NYPD to the highest standards of conduct. But I also remember what this city felt like in the 1970s, and I’m never going to let us go back to that era,” Stringer said in a statement to THE CITY.
Zohran Mamdani, Jessica Ramos, Adrienne Adams, Michael Blake and Brad Lander chose “Maintain roughly the current size of the police force and focus enforcement on serious crimes.” On the campaign trail, all have emphasized aligning law enforcement with mental health and social services. Stringer, too:
“We’re also going to, for the first time, align policing with the greatest mental health initiative this city will ever see,” Stringer said at a mayoral forum in January.
Mamdani said that he wants to scrap the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group and “create the Department of Community Safety to prevent violence before it happens.”
Dealing With Trump
Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration have targeted New York City — clawing back funds the city uses to aid migrants, threatening to end congestion pricing, eliminating funding for key programs and targeting private universities and law firms here.
Cuomo alone declined to answer the question: “How should the next mayor deal with President Trump?” The former governor said only that he wants to “work with any willing partner to advance New York City’s vital interests” yet “intends to “fight back against any incursions on the values or economic interests of all New Yorkers.”
Just one candidate in the Democratic primary field, State Sen. Jessica Ramos, chose “Seek partnership and focus on benefits” as their preferred strategy for dealing with Trump. That’s consistent with what she told the New York Editorial Board earlier this year: “I’m hoping that we have enough of a relationship with the Trump administration for dialogue on issues, even as tricky as these, and that we’re able to make the case for protecting people’s due process.”
Yet she also said at a mayoral forum that she would advocate for the city and state to withhold federal tax dollars from Washington should the president enact more funding cuts that affect the city’s agencies.
Candidates Say Yes to City of Yes – Kind Of
Given multiple options to choose from on how they’d approach creating more affordable housing, nearly all Democratic candidates said they would push for expanding development rights in every community district – a path that’s at the heart of Mayor Adams’ City of Yes housing agenda.
Lander and Ramos, however, noted that given the choice they would select all four options Meet Your Mayor offered — additionally creating better protections for tenants, lowering taxes and development costs, and subsidizing renovations to existing buildings to create more housing.
Lander wants to put the future of the New York City Housing Authority in the hands of its more than 400,000 residents, who would be the ones to decide whether to stay in the existing public housing program or to allow private management or development in their communities to unlock funding that would help upgrade their residences.
“The choice must be made by a majority vote of residents in any NYCHA development. Residents should have all options to consider: private management, Preservation Trust, infill, or remaining traditional Section 9.”
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The post Mayoral Candidates Take Positions on Key Issues in Meet Your Mayor Survey appeared first on THE CITY – NYC News.
