The Eleventh Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, the greatest city in the world, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If this is your first time hi, hello, what fun that we’re all here. If you’d like to get a longer explanation of this project, the first episode may help, but whatever you do, don’t feel any obligation to listen to the mayor’s podcast, I’ve listened to all of it and if it ever gets good I’ll be the first to let you know. Today, I’m talking about the 11th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E11 Brooklyn Navy Yard: An Anchor for Innovation, returning to the Season 1 episode number naming convention, released June 30th 2023.

The mayor does a bit of an extended riff at the top. New York’s not coming back, New York’s back, baby. Our hotels are full and Broadway’s thriving and everyone has a lingering cough when they’re not unable to get out of bed. Great.

At the heart of it all is innovation. So, this time around, Adams is interviewing The President and CEO of Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, Lindsay Greene.

How’d you get here, the mayor asks, one of his patented focused questions that shows he’s done a lot of research on the subject of his interview.

Growing up she had an interest in urban development. She liked business as well. Her mom told her to be good with money. This is really just fascinating stuff to spend like 5 minutes of a 20 minute interview on.

Especially when you haven’t yet told the listener what the Brooklyn Navy Yard is.

There’s a bunch of digressions, at one point Adams complains that his son went to American University in DC but spent all his time on the campus of Howard, which again vital stuff when talking about a Navy Yard in Brooklyn.

Did you go to college in DC, asks the mayor. Lindsay gives the somewhat frosty reply that she attended Harvard. Studied economics. Went to Wall Street. Has lived in NYC for 20 years.

Adams asks what you learn if you get a degree in economics.

So anyway, just tons of research got done for this one.

Lindsay talks a bit about being Black on Wall St and the ways in which the world of finance doesn’t work for people who look like her. She left banking, went to grad school, worked in food, and then joined the city’s government, and now works for the city at the Navy Yard.

Just about halfway through this episode they finally tell us what the Navy Yard is. Dating back to the 1800s, it was a shipyard for the US Navy.

After World War 2, there was a fire. The navy went to privatized building. Ships got too big to go under the Brooklyn Bridge. The navy decommissioned it in the 60s, and later Ed Koch created the Brooklyn Navy Yard development corporation. Today there are 550 firms employing 11000 people there, in a truly diverse workforce. The details are a little outside of my grasp but it seems like the land and buildings are owned and maintained by the city and that’s what Lindsay is in charge of.

They try to keep the rent low. They’re basically a landlord, says Lindsay.

“The greatest prophet of our time said the rent is too damn high” says the mayor laughing, referencing Jimmy McMillan who formed the Rent Is Too Damn High Party to run for governor a couple times, most notably in 2010, as well as mayor a few times and who, best I can tell is still alive and as of 2022, after Mayor Adams was in office, was in a nursing home and fighting eviction so he could return to his apartment. Meanwhile, the mayor has raised the rent twice on rent stabilized apartments since taking over.

Anyhoo.

They talk a bit about some of the stuff that’s being built at the Navy Yard. Some of it sounds kinda cool.

“We surpassed San Francisco in startups” the mayor of a city of 8 million people says randomly referencing a city of less than 1 million people.

They talk about other cool companies at the Navy Yard.

This is a really boring episode, but it is, at least, rooted in facts and the person he’s interviewing appears to not be a scammer. So, that’s all a plus.

It’s easy to get lost at the Navy Yard and they have good security guards.

Well, that’s nice.

Out of nowhere the mayor says, “You crashed the glass ceiling,” and there’s just a little bit of a pause before Lindsay says “thank you”. They’re trying to help with climate change. The mayor says “we need to encourage more children to come visit” and the woman he’s theoretically interviewing, the same woman who had to tell him what her alma mater was assures him that they are once again going to be doing school tours when school is back in session.

And then we’re done. So, I suppose I actually learned a bit about the Navy Yard though I was also incredibly bored, and I’m pretty sure I could just have looked at wikipedia if I wanted any of the info I just got.

Not all of these are going to have a fresh takeaway, or an insight that you can only find here, but all of them are going to underscore how weird it is that a person who had to convince the public to elect has, for close to a year, publicly showed himself to be egregiously bad at communicating with people.

What was the mayor doing between the release of the previous episode on June 15th 2023 and this one on June 30th 2023? To do this I lean heavily on the reporting of two fantastic New York City outlets, The City, and Hell Gate, both of which I support financially, and I encourage you to do so as well. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

Well, he signed legislation that eliminated the 90 day rule that people had to live in shelters for 90 days before getting a housing voucher, which is good!

But he vetoed four other bills designed to help get aid to the homeless and those threatened with homelessness, which is on the whole, much worse.

He endorsed the rent guidelines board raise of the rent on stabilized apartments for the second year in a row.

At a town hall he compared a woman who asked him why rents were so high to a plantation owner. That woman was an 84 year old Holocaust survivor and also I’m not aware of a lot of plantation owners who rented.

His chief of police resigned after only 18 months on the job. Today she’s head of security for the Mets.

When asked about uh that weird shit he said to a Holocaust survivor, Adams refused to apologize and a staffer handed out a list of times Adams had been publicly opposed to the Holocaust.

If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it, but I refuse to believe that liking it does anything, and reviewing it will just take up moments of your life that you could be telling a friend or, I don’t know, learning origami.

Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

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See you next time.