Congressional Candidate Erik Bottcher Wants Your Vote, Again

City Council Member Erik Bottcher, who just won a re-election bid for his Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen district by commanding 90 percent of the vote, is running for Congress.

He’s squaring off against at least 10 candidates, including President John F. Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, as well as the Manhattan Assembly Members Alex Bores and Micah Lasher.

They’re all competing to take the seat that longtime Congressman Jerrold Nadler said he will vacate when his term ends next year.

Dominic Romeo, the independent who lost to Bottcher in the City Council race, blasted his erstwhile opponent for jumping into the race so quickly after winning re-election.

A day after Schlossberg was featured in a glowing New York Times Style section piece, Bottcher quickly confirmed that he’ll be mounting a campaign to replace Nadler in District 12.

Nadler has not officially indicated who he will endorse, but most pundits expect him to endorse Lasher, a longtime aide of his. The Congressional district runs across most of Manhattan from 14th Street to 125th Street, on both the East and West sides.

In a wide-ranging interview with Chelsea News about his ambitions to take Chelsea’s concerns to Washington, Bottcher emphasized that his moving backstory will set him apart from his rivals, even if he will certainly share many priorities with them regardless of who wins.

In his announcement video, Bottcher foregrounded growing up in the Adirondacks as a closeted gay kid, before finding acceptance and empowerment upon moving to the Big Apple.

“I came to the city fleeing bigotry, like people have been for hundreds of years,” he told Chelsea News. “I came here with a couple bags and a few bucks in my pocket, no job lined up. I rented a futon in some guy’s living room in Hell’s Kitchen. Today, I’m a Council member representing that same neighborhood.”

Indeed, his district is inextricable from the LGBTQ community both nationally and internationally, and contains monuments to their civil rights struggle such as the Stonewall Inn. A popular saying is that the area stretches from “the gay bars to Zabar’s.”

Bottcher, who has also served as the NY Governor’s Office’s LGBTQ community liaison, pointed out that he has a ”deep and longstanding relationship with my neighbors in Council District 3.” It’s hard not to imagine them turning out in force for him, not to mention Bottcher benefiting f that Manhattan’s West Side votes from recent political reality that the West Side appears to beat the East Side in head-to-head competition in recent years.

That was evident in the August 2022 Democratic primary, when Nadler—who for years had represented parts of Brooklyn and most of the Upper West Side—was tossed into a new district, where he ran and defeated longtime Upper East Side Congress Member Carolyn Maloney.

More recently, term-limited City Council Member Keith Power lost his bid for Borough President against West Sider Brad Hoylman-Sigal. [Powers is now seeking the Assembly seat that is being vacated by Harvey Epstein, in a Lower East Side and Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village district].

Bottcher said he’ll also be translating some of his other policy work from City Council into both a federal- and Manhattan-focused agenda, such as his “centerpiece” focus on improving mental health services.

“This is an issue that affects every family of New York District 12 in some way,” he said. “Whether it’s a struggle they’re having at home, among their own friends and family, or the fact that you can’t walk more than a few blocks without seeing how badly our society has failed on the issue of mental health.

”It’s quite shameful that we have people dying of untreated mental illness on the streets of New York City, the richest city in the richest country in the world,” he added. “I will start a national conversation about mental health, because the federal government has washed its hands of this issue for decades.”

Bottcher explained that rebuilding a continuum of mental health care would be top-of-mind, “particularly long-term residential treatment options.”

He also expressed alarm about “a national shortage of 7 million homes,” saying that New York City can’t go it alone on alleviating the housing crisis, calling on New York counties outside the five boroughs “to begin contributing to housing construction to help absorb ever-growing demand.” Bottcher noted that he envisions a future with less “sprawl” and more “transit-oriented development.”

Finally, Bottcher expanded on how he expected to translate a popular local initiative—the planting of trees—into a broader mission: “Addressing climate change, natural habitat loss, deforestation, and the extinction crisis is going to be among my top priorities. We need to start treating this like the emergency that it is.”

In addition to phasing out carbon emissions and the usage of fossil fuels, the Council member said that planting trees contributes to a more livable planet in immediate ways, in addition to making New York City’s avenues pleasantly leafy.

“It’s about cleaning the air,” he told Chelsea News. “It’s about absorbing excess rainwater and preventing flooding, it’s about cooling our neighborhoods in the summer.” He cited an “urban forest master plan” that he passed in City Council a couple years ago, which intends to bring 30 percent tree canopy coverage to NYC by 2035.

”Reaching that goal is going to require federal leadership as well,” he said, implying that being a US congressman provides a perfect avenue to do just that.