If at first you don’t succeed — thrive, thrive again.
The former director of Bill de Blasio’s controversial $1 billion ThriveNYC mental health initiative owns a trendy DUMBO boutique — and landed a spot on Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team.
Susan Herman’s quaint shop Plum on Bridge Street peddles handcrafted, locally sourced doo-dads such as a $450 “octagon table” by a woodworker whose artist bio touts his belief that living spaces have a “huge impact on our mental well-being.”
The vaguely woo-woo sentiment echoes the murky therapy speak that bedeviled the Herman-led ThriveNYC — widely considered a vanity project for de Blasio’s wife Chirlane McCray — before it faded from view when Mayor Eric Adams took office in 2022.
Herman also drifted from the public eye, seemingly content to hawk $340 “mega wine bone boards” — until her appointment to Mamdani’s transition committee for community safety caught the eye of New Yorkers who didn’t forget the ThriveNYC fiasco.
“Why would Mamdani appoint someone from a failed program that wasted nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money?” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island), who has called for an investigation into ThriveNYC.
“Instead, he should be doing a case study to see why it was such a loser and do the exact opposite.”
ThriveNYC became an albatross for de Blasio as he faced allegations he used it to boost McCray’s profile and questions about its spending and effectiveness. The program’s leaders, especially McCray, often couldn’t spell out its overall goals — even in high-profile City Council hearings over the years.
The initiative was eventually renamed the Office of Community Mental Health and still operates, albeit with a low profile.
In many ways, ThriveNYC shares similarities with Mamdani’s proposed “Department of Community Safety,” a new agency he envisions will ease the NYPD’s burden on many public safety issues — including mental health.
Whether Herman is expected to tap into her experience with ThriveNYC to help Mamdani roll out his new department is unclear.
Herman declined to comment and Mamdani’s team didn’t immediately respond.
But her reemergence left some New Yorkers with déjà vu.
“Zohran ran on ‘transparency,’ yet he’s rolling out City Hall swamp creature Susan Herman as though any of us have forgotten her billion-dollar disappearing act with ThriveNYC that allegedly magically transferred taxpayer cash into Chirlane McCray’s pockets,” said Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club.
“At this rate, the Mamdani administration is shaping up to be de Blasio 2.0 with the same cronies and same grift. The scariest part is that Zohran might actually be better at leading the radical circus than de Blasio.”
