On Thursday, federal prosecutors unsealed a fifty-seven-page indictment alleging that the mayor of New York City took bribes, destroyed evidence, defrauded taxpayers, and pressured the Fire Department of New York on behalf of a foreign government. Eric Adams claimed to speak for the city’s working class and then, the indictment asserts, sold them out for luxury travel and a fraudulent straw donor scheme. He needs to resign now.

Even before facing corruption charges, Adams was failing New Yorkers. His own Mayor’s Management Report, which he strangely touted in a press conference earlier this month, revealed an inability to effectively govern. While the number of New Yorkers who need cash assistance is skyrocketing, the city is efficiently processing fewer than half of applications — it was 95.4 percent during Mayor Bill de Blasio’s final year in office. That same year, 91.9 percent of SNAP benefits were delivered in a timely fashion. Now it’s only 65 percent, up from a truly dismal 40 percent in 2023.

It now takes the city more than a year to fill vacancies in public housing units. Use of force and unconstitutional stops by the NYPD are rising along with emergency response times, while police overtime now exceeds $1 billion. Year after year, the Adams administration has violated city law requiring the expansion of dedicated bus lanes, making our system the slowest in the nation.

Far from addressing the cost-of-living crisis driving working people out of our city, Eric Adams has actively made it worse.

He has raised the rent on more than two million tenants in regulated housing every year in office. He supported ConEd’s application to increase our utility bills by more than $70 per month. He signed off on the largest water bill hike in thirteen years. He cut funding from schools, libraries, and childcare, and refused to implement an expansion of housing vouchers. These policies were largely celebrated by the city’s elite and are perfectly legal. But they’re even more scandalous than free business-class flights.

Many of Adams’s backers among the city’s wealthy and powerful will now try to distance themselves from the mayor. But we must remember he was their choice in the 2021 election precisely because of his openness to big money influence.

Asked whether he would refuse developer contributions during that race, he declared, “I am real estate.” Hedge fund executives, billionaires, and charter school promoters lavished him with funds, and in return, he promised New York “will no longer be anti-business.” The Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post “enthusiastically endorsed” him for mayor.

Now these same forces will attempt to anoint a successor. Andrew Cuomo may well be their choice. Even before the more recent scandals that resulted in his resignation, the disgraced former governor’s own inner circle faced bribery and corruption charges. But Cuomo has also long been a favorite of New York’s ruling class. Forty-three different billionaires contributed $8 million over his three runs for governor, and he returned the favor by consistently fighting tax hikes on the wealthy. Cuomo shuttered an anti-corruption inquiry just as it started to investigate his pay-to-play corporate welfare schemes. It’s no surprise that Adams’s same backers may view Cuomo as their surest path to maintaining power over City Hall. They’re cut from the same cloth.

We cannot replace one disgraced, corrupt executive with another. New York’s working families are being bled dry by rent, energy bills, childcare costs, and groceries. They are the ones being pushed out of this city — and politicians backed by the price gougers will only make it worse. We need to build a political movement in this city that takes power back for the working class and delivers the kinds of transformative policies that can make life here not only livable but good.