Promises, promises.
A dubious Eric Adams slammed his main mayoral rival Zohran Mamdani’s socialist proposals as a bunch of “false promises” sure to harm the upstart’s lower-income supporters.
Adams, in a newly released interview, made clear his disdain for Mamdani’s arguably pie-in-the-sky solutions stemmed from his own hardscrabble childhood.
“I truly believe the worst thing you can do as New Yorkers are struggling is to make broken promises,” he told The Post’s Miranda Devine for her “Pod Force One” podcast.
“I saw that as a child. My mother was raising six children. Oftentimes she would get those broken promises never to resolve the issues we were facing — and that is what (Mamdani’s) doing,” Adams said.
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“I think it’s unfair to New Yorkers, and it’s unfair to the direction that the city is moving in now, and it is in the right direction.”
The attack against Mamdani — who clinched the nomination of Adams’ Democratic Party in the mayoral primary by running a campaign relentlessly focused on affordability — didn’t stop there during the mayor’s wide-ranging conversation with Devine.
Adams, who is running for re-election as an independent on the “Safe and Affordable” line, zeroed in on Mamdani’s marquee proposals, arguing they simply won’t work out in reality.
The socialist’s promise to make buses free “sounds good,” Adams acknowledged.
“But it costs $3 billion and mayors don’t have the ability to raise income taxes,” Adams said.
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“(Mamdani) stated he’s going to raise income tax on the high 1% of New Yorkers, when at the same time he’s saying that billionaires should not be in our city, so he can’t raise the income taxes, so he’s making these false promises.”
Likewise, Adams argued Mamdani’s plan to build a city-owned grocery store in each borough and freeze rents on rent-regulated apartments will eventually end up hurting working-class New Yorkers.
“If the cost of running a building is higher than the rent roll of the building, then you’re going to see eventually lack of repairs, lack of quality of life, and again, that is going to hurt low-income New Yorkers,” Adams said.
Hizzoner also knocked Mamdani’s repeated support for shuttering Rikers Island in 2027 and opening the doors to controversial borough-based jails in the Big Apple.
Under that plan, though, whoever is in City Hall will have to relocate roughly 3,000 inmates, since Rikers has more than 7,000 people behind bars and the borough jails are only set to accommodate just over 4,000 accused criminals.
Mamdani has been scant on details on how to address the shortfall of beds with the Rikers replacement, only saying he’d work with the various district attorneys to release more people or enroll them in pretrial intervention.
Adams, a former NYPD captain, likened the plan to empty Rikers to the state’s 2019 bail reform legislation — which he maintains has let criminals run free in the city.
“If he empties out Rikers Island, those dangerous people are going to go back into the communities that they inflicted violence in in the first place, and they’re largely black and brown communities,” Adams said.
“So, the individuals he’s stating he wants to help, he’s actually hurting.”
Adams knocked former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who signed bail reform into law. Cuomo is mounting a political comeback by running as an independent in the November mayoral election — after getting trounced by Mamdani in last month’s Dem primary.
And the mayor took time to slam another rival, too, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
“When I look at the candidates that are in the race, one has no record,” he said, referring to Sliwa, who has never held an elected office.
“The other is running away from his records,” he said about Cuomo, “such as bail reform of 15,000 of our seniors dying in nursing homes and other issues.”
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