Brad Lander Is Building a United Progressive Front

Last June, after a man named Edgardo wrapped up an immigration hearing at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, he was escorted out of the facility by a new friend: Brad Lander, then the New York City comptroller. Suddenly, ICE agents tried to impede them and take Edgardo into custody. Lander asked to see a judicial warrant, which is required for ICE to detain someone. In response, agents handcuffed Lander and arrested him instead. He was released hours later.

Lincoln Restler, who represents the city’s 33rd District on the New York City Council, took notice. He told the Prospect that Lander usually flies under the media radar, which made his arrest all the more shocking.

“He’s not the flashiest guy or the most dynamic orator,” he said, “but he just does consequential work that makes a real difference in people’s lives.”

Read more from James Baratta | Emma Janssen

In fact, Lander had been working on immigration issues long before his arrest. As comptroller in 2022, he spearheaded the effort to expand health care coverage to undocumented New Yorkers. The “Coverage for All” proposal, as it was called, made it into both New York’s Assembly and Senate budget bills, but wasn’t included in the final budget signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul.

That proposal, and Lander’s work battling ICE, comes out of a core belief about politics. “People play team sports all the time, but elected officials or politicians? Not so much,” Lander told the Prospect recently. Improving people’s lives or protecting them from harm comes naturally when you see that person struggling as a teammate.

This mentality could propel Lander into Congress this year. He is challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) in a race that is pitting New York City’s old and new politics against one another. Lander has received substantial progressive support, including from Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he assisted during the mayoral primary to ensure a ranked-choice victory, and who returned the favor with an ’80s-infused endorsement video this week. A little help from his friends has been how Lander has gotten into position to use his deep policy expertise and activist impulses to try to make life better for the people he served.

WHEN LANDER MOVED TO NEW YORK CITY from Chicago in 1992, he was 23. But he had built many of the skills that have come to serve him in New York City. At the University of Chicago, he helped found a student organization called Partners in Community Development, which worked with other South Side organizations to improve public-housing conditions.

He was also a member of an organization called the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, and worked for Larry Bloom, who was running for a local alderman seat (unfortunately, as Lander notes, Bloom turned out to be corrupt and went to prison).

In an interview with his alma mater’s student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, Lander discussed the driving question of his undergraduate studies: “What is a person?”

“How do we think about what a person deserves in the sense of human rights and dignity, and what is a person capable of in terms of contributing to democratic decision-making and the polity?” he said in the Maroon.

Once in New York, Lander found friends at the Working Families Party (WFP), “my political home for more than 25 years,” he said. The electoral organization that has a ballot line in New York state supplied the infrastructure Lander used to advance the work of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a community development and advocacy organization where he served as executive director from 1993 to 2003.

Lander is in position to use his deep policy expertise and activist impulses to try to make life better for the people he served.

Lander grew the Fifth Avenue Committee from a small nonprofit into a major affordable-housing developer, revitalizing buildings abandoned at the height of the city’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. He took advantage of programs designed to transfer city-owned properties to nonprofit developers, often working with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to convert buildings in Park Slope, Gowanus, and Red Hook into affordable housing.

Lander wasn’t afraid to challenge power. In his first year at Fifth Avenue, he convened some 400 tenants to form the South Brooklyn Coalition to Save the Rent Laws. The coalition of organizers fought to preserve tenant protections in the face of rising rents, gentrification, and redlining.

“Brad was a genius at playing the inside-outside game,” Peter Dreier, a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College who has known Lander since the 1990s, told the Prospect. “It’s a set of skills that activists don’t always learn.”

Entering the New York City Council in 2009, Lander represented many of the same neighborhoods he labored to make more affordable and accessible to working families. “Affordable housing has been the work of my whole career,” Lander told the Prospect.

Throughout his city council tenure, he strived to strengthen tenant protections through his Certificate of No Harassment (CONH) pilot program, which was extended and expanded in 2021.

Lander also implemented one of the most ambitious land use plans in New York City history. The Gowanus neighborhood, situated along a Superfund site, was rezoned with $200 million in city funds, rehabilitating over a thousand New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) units.

Their organizing bore fruit; it also demonstrated the city could breathe life into public housing without transferring management to private operators. “This plan did not start in a developer’s office, or at City Hall,” Lander wrote in a City Limits op-ed he co-authored at the time. “It started through community planning, a series of public conversations that generated core principles for what inclusive, sustainable growth in the neighborhood would require.”

THE COUNCIL’S 47-1 APPROVAL OF THE PLAN came less than a month after Lander was elected New York City comptroller, where he strove to harness the office’s power to materially improve New Yorkers’ quality of life. Under his leadership, the city’s five pension funds saw tremendous growth, peaking at 10.3 percent returns in 2025. But that wasn’t his only concern. “As we’ve earned those great returns, the pension funds have been able to help address some of these other broad economic issues,” Lander told the Prospect.

Housing, of course, was one of them.

“The single investment I’m proudest of was saving 35,000 affordable-housing, mostly rent-stabilized units that were put at risk when Signature Bank failed,” he said. “Their mortgages were up for auction and could have been bought by bottom-feeders, who would have thrown those tenants out of their homes.” Instead, Lander directed the New York City Employees’ Retirement System (NYCERS) to invest $60 million in a joint venture created to preserve those units. “Every unit is preserved as rent-stabilized housing, and they’re delivering great returns,” Lander said.

The venture remains a core fixture of the Economically Targeted Investments program, which seeks to generate strong, market-rate returns while preserving rent-stabilized housing across New York City, either by purchasing long-term mortgages attached to affordable-housing developments, or partnering with asset managers to acquire residential real estate loans on the secondary mortgage market.

Lander also leveraged the authority of his office to engage asset managers on labor and climate issues in a meaningful way. As our colleague Robert Kuttner observed in 2024, Lander persuaded private equity firm Apollo Global Management to adopt a labor peace agreement for its Venetian Resort Las Vegas holding, the biggest non-union property on the Strip, in exchange for a follow-on investment from city pension funds.

That peace agreement bore fruit, and the Venetian unionized. According to Lander, “5,000 hotel workers have a good union contract because New York City’s workers pensions invested in a responsible way.”

The city pension funds demonstrated a rare form of engagement, one that goes beyond shareholder resolutions and strongly worded letters. This was replicated by encouraging Starbucks and Amazon to institute safer workplaces. And Lander targeted net-zero emissions by 2040 in the pension fund investments he oversaw, hitting its targets “one year ahead of schedule,” a statement from the comptroller’s office explains, both decarbonizing the existing investments and growing allocations to climate solutions. In 2025 alone, the systems saw their exposure to climate solutions surge to nearly $12 billion, while still achieving solid returns.

“He was able to take what could be an accounting job and turned it into an advocacy job,” Dreier told the Prospect.

LANDER’S UNSUCCESSFUL MAYORAL CAMPAIGN was marked by his policy expertise and, later, his work as a sort of connecting figure between Mamdani and New York’s Jewish community. As progressive underdogs in the primary race, Mamdani and Lander joined forces, cross-endorsing each other in an incredibly charming video that featured the two of them rolling up on Citi Bikes and drinking from Greek coffee cups.

Once Mamdani won the primary, Lander used his relationships with Jewish community leaders to help Mamdani build relationships among Jewish New Yorkers. In October, Lander told the Prospect that he mainly focused on securing Mamdani connections to these community voices.

Lander identifies as a liberal Zionist, a position he fleshed out in an podcast interview with Rabbi Ammi Hirsch in June 2025. “I love, I’m inspired by, I believe in the vision of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” he said. “Now, I’m fiercely critical of this government and of the occupation and even of the way it has prosecuted and is prosecuting the war.”

Throughout his mayoral campaign and now during his congressional race, Lander has walked a fine line in communicating his stance toward Israel. He has been an outspoken voice against the mass starvation and killing of Gazans, and has called for anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists to join together to speak out against what he now calls a genocide.

According to Track AIPAC, which tallies political donations from the pro-Israel lobby, Goldman has received over $1.5 million from AIPAC-affiliated groups and mega-donors. In his campaign launch video, Lander spoke out against AIPAC.

“I’m running for Congress,” Lander said. “Because the challenges we face can’t be solved with sternly worded letters or high-dollar fundraisers. And not by doing AIPAC’s bidding in a district that knows our safety, our freedom, our thriving is bound up together.”

In 2023, in his role as comptroller, Lander made the decision to let the city’s longtime pension fund investments in Israel lapse, drawing criticism from then-Mayor Eric Adams. Now, Mark Levine, Lander’s successor as comptroller, has pledged to reinstate those investments. Both Mamdani and Lander have voiced their opposition to that decision.

“Brad stands by his decision to cease purchasing Israel bonds. It was a decision rooted in his fiduciary duty as Comptroller, not in his political opinions. NYC’s pension funds hold no other foreign sovereign debt, and he believes they should not make an exception to that rule to favor Israel,” a spokesperson for Lander’s congressional campaign said in a statement to the Prospect.

But Lander’s decisions as comptroller have also raised some ire from the left. One story from amNewYork highlighted his expansion of investments in Palantir, which has partnerships with ICE. Others have condemned investments in polluting firms and private equity. Critics have referred to Lander as “BlackRock Brad.”

BlackRock did make gestures toward a net-zero mandate during the Biden administration, although that was rejected when Trump entered office. “I hope that BlackRock will get back to recognizing that climate risk is financial risk,” Lander said.

Lander is hoping that the visibility he garnered from his mayoral campaign and work as a Mamdani surrogate will give him an edge against Goldman, who has already gained a number of crucial endorsements. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Comptroller Levine, and the liberal Zionist group J Street have all endorsed Goldman (though J Street also designated Lander as a “primary-approved” candidate, which means donors can still give to his campaign through the organization’s website).

In late January, though, state Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Pearlman threw a wrench into the race that has changed Lander’s campaign strategy. Pearlman ruled in favor of an election law firm aligned with the Democratic Party, deciding that New York City’s only congressional district represented by a Republican must be redrawn. Pearlman affirmed the argument that the district’s current composition dilutes the votes of Black and Hispanic residents.

That district, New York’s 11th, is represented by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. On February 12, Malliotakis filed an emergency application for stay with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The Supreme Court hasn’t given a decision yet.

If the redraw is allowed to move forward, it may leave Lander running unopposed in the Tenth District and pit Goldman against the more conservative Malliotakis. Lander has said that he’s currently pulling punches against Goldman as the legal arguments play out, “because as many problems as I have with Dan Goldman, he’s a lot better than Nicole Malliotakis.”

Goldman’s campaign rejected the idea that Lander is taking the political high road. “Now he’s looking for an off-ramp for his sputtering campaign,” Goldman spokesperson Simone Kanter wrote on X.

With only a few months to go until the Democratic primary, Lander remains hopeful that his organizer mentality and burgeoning grassroots support will lead him to victory—and his supporters are too.

“He’s very earnest and kind of dorky,” Restler told the Prospect. “Brad is an exceptionally good policymaker, and we need more of those in Washington.”