Brad Lander
Bradford Scott Lander is an American politician and urban planner who served as the 45th New York City comptroller from 2022 until 2025. A progressive Democrat, Lander was elected to the New York City Council in 2009, serving for twelve years, later serving as Deputy Leader for Policy. His district was partly based in Brooklyn. Lander was elected city comptroller in 2021 and assumed office on January 1, 2022.
Born in suburban St. Louis, Lander's political career has been rooted in New York City since the 1990s, where he has become a mainstay in progressive activism.
In July 2024, Lander announced he would challenge incumbent Mayor Eric Adams in the 2025 New York City mayoral election. The New York Times Opinion panel and Ezra Klein chose Lander as their top choice for the Democratic primary for mayor separately. He conceded defeat in the primary election to Zohran Mamdani on June 24, 2025. His decision to cross-endorse and campaign with Mamdani was considered crucial to his victory in the primary due to the city's ranked choice voting system.
On December 10, 2025, Lander announced his candidacy for the 2026 primary election in New York's 10th congressional district against Dan Goldman from the left. He launched with endorsements from Mamdani, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Jumaane Williams and the Working Families Party.
Early life and education
Brad Lander is the son of Carole Lander and David Lander, a bankruptcy attorney. He grew up in Creve Coeur, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, in a Reform Jewish family, and graduated from Parkway North High School in 1987. He developed an early interest in politics, and was particularly influenced by civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel. His first experience organizing came with a march for Jewish Soviet refugees in Washington. Lander earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1991, where he received a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, and joined the Democratic Socialists of America. He earned master's degrees in anthropology from University College London on a Marshall Scholarship and in urban planning from Pratt Institute.Early career
From 1993 to 2003, Lander was the executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a Park Slope non-profit organization that develops and manages affordable housing. For his work he received the 2000 New York Magazine Civics Award, and FAC received the 2002 Leadership for a Changing World award.From 2003 to 2009, Lander was a director of the university-based Pratt Center for Community Development. In that position, he was a critic of the Bloomberg administration's development policies. He has also been a critic of the Atlantic Yards project. Lander's work in 2003–2005 on Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning led to the first New York City inclusionary housing program to create affordable housing in new development outside Manhattan. Lander served on a mayoral taskforce that recommended reforms to the 421-a tax exemption for luxury housing and required that new development in certain areas of the city set aside affordable housing units. He co-led the completion of the One City One Future platform, a progressive vision for economic development in New York City. He stepped down as head of the organization in 2009 to seek a seat on the New York City Council. Lander teaches as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School.
New York City Council
Lander represented the 39th district in New York City Council from 2009 until 2021, when term limits prevented him from running again. He is a co-founder of the Progressive Caucus in the New York City Council. For his first term, Lander shared the title of co-chair of the caucus with his Manhattan colleague, Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.In 2009, Lander ran to represent the 39th district on the New York City Council, including the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Boerum Hill, Borough Park, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Flatbush, Gowanus, Green-Wood Cemetery, Kensington, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Red Hook, Prospect Park, South Slope, Sunset Park, and Windsor Terrace. He won the hotly contested Democratic primary on September 15, 2009, with 41% of the vote in a field of five and appeared on the general election ballot on the Democratic Party and Working Families Party lines. On November 4, 2009, he won with 70% of the vote. After his first four-year term, Lander was reelected on the Democratic and Working Families Parties' lines in 2013 to serve for a second term.
Political positions
Participatory budgeting
Lander was one of four Council members who brought participatory budgeting to New York City, which allows citizens to propose, develop, and vote on items in the municipal budget. Over half of the 51 New York City Council Districts now engage in participatory budgeting.Labor
In 2013, Lander played a key role in a campaign to pass paid sick leave over Mayor Bloomberg's veto, telling the Brooklyn Reporter that the legislation would "make our city a fairer, more compassionate place to live and work". In 2015, Lander passed legislation to ban discriminatory employment credit checks, ending the practice of companies discriminating against people because of their credit history.In March 2015, outside a Park Slope, Brooklyn car wash that was closed at the time, Lander was arrested for blocking traffic to show support for eight striking car washers; it was his fourth arrest. In November 2016, he announced his intention to get arrested as part of the "Fight for $15" National Day of Action, saying it was: "part of a long tradition of civil disobedience, and it takes a little courage".
Lander has crafted a number of workers' rights policies. In 2017, he passed legislation to require fast food and retail companies to give their workers stable scheduling and restrict on-call scheduling and last-minute changes. Lander also sponsored a successful bill to prevent fast food workers from being fired without just cause and to allow them to appeal terminations through arbitration. He worked with the Freelancers Union to create the "Freelance Isn't Free Act," the first legislation of its kind to ensure that freelancers and independent contractors are paid on time and in full. In 2018, Lander successfully achieved the first ruling in the country that guaranteed a living wage for Uber, Lyft and other for-hire drivers. By April 2020, Lander had sponsored over 2,254 articles of legislation. City and State New York ranked Lander's performance in the lower half of all New York City lawmakers, placing him 30th out of the 51 councilmembers; the ranking criteria included total number of bills introduced, the number of bills signed into law, attendance, and responsiveness to questions from constituents and from the media.
Development and housing
Lander opposed rezoning the site of Long Island College Hospital to include affordable housing. In July 2017, he was the primary sponsor of 20 local laws enacted by the City Council and signed by the mayor. In addition, Lander played a role in helping shepherd the Community Safety Act through the New York City Council for final passage, along with councilmember Jumaane Williams. In 2017, Lander worked with advocates at the Association of Neighborhood and Housing Development and Make the Road New York to create a Certificate of No Harassment program that provides the strongest protections against tenant harassment and displacement of any law in the country. As part of the #TooHotToLearn campaign, Lander led the push to secure air-conditioning for all New York City Public Schools classrooms, shining a spotlight on the 25 percent of classrooms that did not have it.Starting in 2019, Lander has drawn criticism and, in his words, "anger" and "suspicion", for vocally supporting contracts for two homeless shelters in particular. Opponents of the shelters claimed that those contracts contain up to $89 million of unexplained cost compared to contracts for equivalent shelters, and that costs were too high at $10,557 per unit per month. Starting in 2020, Lander has been a leading advocate of a program that has moved over 9,500 homeless people to vacant hotel rooms across New York City to provide space for social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, at an average cost of $174 per room per night. The proposal drew intense criticism from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's New York City Department of Social Services, which Lander called "cartoonish insults". The program drew strong reactions from neighborhood residents, with some residents calling the homeless men "subhuman" and claiming the program led to increases in crime, open drug sales and drug use, public sex acts, and street harassment, and worrying about the risk of having sex offenders housed near a public school; other residents were more open to the program, and the owner of a restaurant next door to the hotel reported that, despite some residents' alarm, there had been no problems.
Social justice
In January 2021 he said: "As a white man, starts by listening as honestly as I can to Black people about the anger and pain they are feeling, and the system of white supremacy and systemic racism it reflects. That is not easy – because it implicates me...." He supported removing the statue of Christopher Columbus from Columbus Circle in Manhattan.Israel and Palestine
Lander's council district included large numbers of Jewish and Muslim people. According to The Forward, Lander has worked to balance relationships with both groups, "befriending both the far-right Brooklyn politician Dov Hikind and the pro-Palestinian activist and organizer Linda Sarsour". Hikind criticized Lander and other progressive politicians for not distancing themselves from Sarsour, citing her criticism of Israel and past associations with controversial figures such as Louis Farrakhan.In 2020, Lander wrote that he had visited the West Bank to learn more about conditions under the Israeli occupation and expressed support for efforts to achieve Palestinian human rights.
In March 2023, Lander wrote an op-ed in the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz urging President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to stop providing a "blank check" to an "increasingly authoritarian" Israeli government and asked Democrats to stop obeying the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC. He wrote that he participated in a protest outside the Israeli consulate in solidarity with the 2023 Israeli judicial reform protests.
Lander left the Democratic Socialists of America in 2023 after the October 7 attacks. In a September 2025 speech, Lander championed the creation of an alliance "of anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists" seeking to end "the horrors in Gaza" in an appearance with Mamdani before the 2025 NYC mayoral election. According to New York, he is "a liberal Zionist who has called Israel's war in Gaza a genocide and supports conditioning military aid" to Israel In a December 2025 interview with Zeteo, he said that if elected he would vote to recognize a Palestinian state and would oppose the sale of offensive weapons to Israel. Lander also strongly opposed the censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib while calling for Rep. Randy Fine to be censured for his Islamophobic comments, including calls for genocide of American Muslims.