For the third time in as many years, residents in Queens are voting for a borough president and, perhaps, it’s not a surprise that this year’s race has the feeling of an encore, with no new candidates eager to outrightly challenge the rising star theatrics of Donovan Richards, the city councilman who emerged victorious in a five-way race that pitted the real estate-development backed councilman against an assortment of other city council members along with more minor candidates.  

This time around, one of those candidates has returned — Elizabeth Crowley, a former city council member who came within a few hundred votes of winning last time. Crowley will be most well-known to local readers: while in city council, she was the visible face of the $7 million renovation of the Ridgewood Reservoir, which reopened to the public in 2013. But the good will did not last long and, in 2017, she was ejected by an insurgent campaign led by Bob Holden and which focused on the building of a homeless shelter in Masbeth.  

This time, Crowley has positioned herself as something of an insurgent herself and her campaign has adopted accordingly, from sending out mailers meant to look like eviction notices and, more recently, putting her fate behind Andrew Yang’s mayoral run. Like a number of races around the city, the election this year has turned on the issue of development and real estate, issues that borough presidents have a particular, if curious, role in. In a direct sort of way, the presidents are intermediaries between developers and the constellation of community boards whose members the president ultimately appoints (Back in April, Donovan named a little over a hundred new members of these boards.) They are tasked also with penning nonbinding advisory reports on such developments. It’s an oblique task, one routinely dismissed as powerless, but on that point, the argument on Crowley’s mailers is clear: “The developers making Queens less affordable are funding Donovan Richards.”