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 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 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 fully and on time. In 2018, Lander achieved the first ruling in the country to guarantee 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 number of bills introduced, number of bills signed into law, attendance, and responsiveness to questions from constituents and the media.
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. Lander also played a role in helping shepherd the Community Safety Act through the City Council, 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 lacked it.
Homelessness Since 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 the 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. Since 2020, Lander has been a leading advocate of a program that has moved over 9,500
homeless people (his goal is 30,000) to vacant New York City hotel rooms to provide space for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, at an average cost of $174 per room per night ($5,293 per person per month). Landers' efforts drew intense criticism from Mayor
Bill de Blasio's
New York City Department of Social Services, which Lander called "cartoonish insults".
Social justice In January 2021 Lander said: "As a white man, [the work of racial justice] 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 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 asking 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 split with and left the
Democratic Socialists of America in 2023 following the
October 7 attacks. In a September 2025 speech, he 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 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, Lander said that if elected he would vote to recognize a Palestinian state and oppose the sale of offensive weapons to Israel. Lander also strongly opposed the censure of U.S. Representative
Rashida Tlaib while calling for U.S. Representative
Randy Fine to be censured for his Islamophobic comments, including calls for genocide of
American Muslims.
Public safety and policing In March 2020, as the
COVID-19 pandemic began, Lander urged that the police suspend criminal arrests, summonses, warrant enforcement, and parole violations for low-level offenses, and release most of the over 900 people incarcerated at
Rikers Island who were over 50 years old. Lander voiced support for
defunding the police and limiting police powers by cutting their budget by $1 billion in 2020. In June 2020, he said, "It is time to defund the police". In December he called for the disbandment of the
New York City Police Department Vice Unit and for
decriminalizing prostitution. In December 2017, Lander was arrested at the
U.S. Capitol while protesting a bill that lowered taxes on corporations and wealthy people while cutting healthcare; he tweeted, "Being arrested with
Ady Barkan in the halls of Congress while ... fighting for a country where we provide health care for those who need it ... is something I'll remember for the rest of my life". In June 2018 he was arrested for blocking traffic, disorderly conduct, and failing to disperse at a protest outside the Brooklyn office of State Senator
Marty Golden. In 2019, Lander admitted to an
ethics violation for using his official government position to solicit monetary donations for a progressive nonprofit he helped create and of which he was chairman. Lander had previously served as chair of the council's Committee on Rules, Privileges and Elections. In his second term on the council, he served as the deputy leader for policy. == New York City comptroller ==