Are Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul Still Friends?

Update 9/27: This article has been updated to include a statement Governor Hochul made after it was first published.

Hochul was enthusiastic in her support for Adams’s initial 2022 bid to retain mayoral control of the New York City school system. When Adams asked for a three-year extension, she pushed for four. “I said I was more collaborative,” she said at the time. “I’m showing you how I’m more collaborative.” (During that year’s legislative session, state lawmakers settled on two years, though Adams received another two-year extension as part of the most recent budget deal.)

In the election later that year, Hochul faced a Republican challenger who was polling too close for comfort and attacking the new governor for being soft on crime. As she campaigned, she partnered with Adams to pass aggressive criminal justice policies, leaning on his established police-friendly bona fides.

They tag-teamed efforts to alter New York’s bail reform statute. Adams wanted to give judges ultimate discretion to keep anyone charged with a crime jailed pending their trial so long as they saw them as “dangerous,” especially if they were found with a gun. Hochul did what she could, facing down staunch opposition from the left to force through bail law adjustments during tense spring budget negotiations in 2022 and 2023.

The two also worked in lock step to repeatedly flood the city subway system with cops, starting by targeting homeless riders in 2022. Adams mobilized round after round of NYPD deployments, and Hochul pitched in MTA cops — then, earlier this year, raised the ante with State Police officers and National Guard troops. While they’ve both asserted that New York City transit is safe, New York needs an expanded police presence to “win on feeling safe,” in Adams’s words, and “change the psychology around crime,” in Hochul’s.

Their focus on policing has kept the mayor and governor close: a “partnership,” as they both have described it, cracking down on pro-Palestine protests, unlicensed weed shops, and fare and toll evasion.

“Governor, I don’t know if you are a basketball player, but the points you put on the board is only part of the game. The game is also the assist,” Adams said in June after a slew of marijuana shop busts.

Another area of partnership has been housing development. During her 2024 State of the State address, Hochul supported Adams’s plan to build 500,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade — a goal he called “our moonshot,” referencing John F. Kennedy’s efforts to land an astronaut on the moon. “Let them build,” Hochul said.

That effort has advanced somewhat over the last year, but hasn’t taken off in the way either hoped. Hochul’s plan to build more was supposed to be the cornerstone of her state budget last year, but it crashed and burned. This year, Hochul finally won a replacement for the widely used 421-a tax credit — after two years of trying. Adams said the deal reflected “a real desire of: how do we get Eric what he needs.”

Housing aside, Adams has not always been able to count on the governor to get his priorities passed.

In 2022, after some delay, Hochul signed a controversial bill requiring New York City to reduce class sizes in schools over five years, a move the city’s Independent Budget Office estimates would cost nearly $2 billion a year. Adams had opposed the legislation, arguing the city can’t afford it.

Hochul has also delivered considerably less funding to support migrants and asylum seekers than Adams said the city needed. This year’s final budget included about $2.5 billion to that end — half of what Adams asked for.

The ever-ebullient mayor still touted the budget deal as a win. Holding up a cup of water, he told a civic and business group in April, “Do we get this full glass? No. But this glass is half-full — three-quarters full.”