Austin Mayor Steve Adler

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Austin Mayor Steve Adler 52nd Mayor of Austin, Texas.

Join me at Chez Zee on Wednesday, Oct 21 for a Texas Author Happy Hour. I'll be talking about my book Hot Seat, Hot City...
10/12/2026

Join me at Chez Zee on Wednesday, Oct 21 for a Texas Author Happy Hour. I'll be talking about my book Hot Seat, Hot City: The Austin Mayor's Story with Kerry Tate. Happy hour at 6:00 PM, interview at 6:30. $15 ($7 for students) at chez-zee.com/events. Hope to see you there!

When Austin lost power and water during the 2021 winter storm, neighbors helped neighbors get through when there was no ...
10/05/2026

When Austin lost power and water during the 2021 winter storm, neighbors helped neighbors get through when there was no one else to rely upon.

That experience shapes how I think about AI risks today.

As individuals and neighbors we have power and control over much of what happens to us.

There is a serious debate about whether advanced AI exceeds or might exceed our ability to control it. It’s true that both adverse risks and potential benefits are enormous.

It’s because the stakes are so high that this is one of those times when each of us must get involved.

As I write in RealClearMarkets:

"AI shouldn't be something that just happens to us; it should be something whose development and use society helps shape."

Ordinary people belong in this discussion. That’s how we ensure that government and the companies building these systems put appropriate safeguards in place.

And we act now on those risks we do understand. AI-assisted fraud, impersonation, and cyberattacks are risks we prepare for now. We don't need to settle every question about AI's future before we protect our communities.

My book, Hot Seat, Hot City, tells the story of governing Austin through eight years of difficult decisions. We should take lessons from those years into the AI debate. We have more power individually than we realize, especially when we act together. Prepare before systems fail and build relationships you can count on when they do.

Read the article:
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2026/10/02/we_need_a_serious_discussion_about_ai_risks_1209080.html

More about the book:
https://mayoradler.com

09/28/2026

More than one million Texas voters have been placed on suspense lists and given an October 5 deadline to confirm their eligibility. But being on that list does not necessarily mean someone is ineligible to vote. It may be as simple as updating an address.

I joined Cheryl Chumley on The Washington Times’ Bold & Blunt to talk about what is happening, what voters should know, and the larger questions around voter integrity.

The full interview and my book, Hot Seat, Hot City, are linked in the first comment.

I recently sat down with Adam Flagg for Austin Eras to talk about Austin, public service, and the stories behind Hot Sea...
09/24/2026

I recently sat down with Adam Flagg for Austin Eras to talk about Austin, public service, and the stories behind Hot Seat — Hot City.

Our full conversation is now live. Watch it at the link in the first comment.

I'm giving away 25 hardcover copies of Hot Seat — Hot City on Goodreads, now through September 30.It's the story of eigh...
09/14/2026

I'm giving away 25 hardcover copies of Hot Seat — Hot City on Goodreads, now through September 30.

It's the story of eight years when every crisis found its way to the Austin mayor's desk — the bombings, the pandemic, homelessness, policing — told from the seat where the decisions got made. Pete Buttigieg wrote the foreword.

Entering is free and takes one click: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/451128-hot-seat-hot-city-the-austin-mayor-s-story

And if you've already read it — an honest review, anywhere, is the most helpful thing a reader can do for other readers.

08/24/2026

HOT SEAT, HOT CITY: The Austin Mayor's Story
Tomorrow. And I didn't want you to take my word for it.

For five weeks I've been telling you about this book, which means you've had five weeks of the author's opinion. So on the eve of launch, here's what the people who've actually sat in the seat say: 48 mayors, sitting and former, red states and blue, endorsed this book. A few of their words:

"One of America's greatest mayors, showing us where democracy still lives and thrives."
Eric Garcetti, Mayor of Los Angeles

"The book I wish I'd had when I became mayor… I recommend it to every mayor. You should read it twice."
Steve Benjamin, Mayor of Columbia and past president, U.S. Conference of Mayors

"Fast decisions, imperfect information, and the weight of knowing your call will shape thousands of lives."
Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago

"No backup. No playbook. No time for consensus. Just you and impossible choices."
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Mayor of Baltimore

And among my favorites, from Mayor Andy Berke of Chattanooga, in full: "Buy this book. Then run for office."

HOT SEAT, HOT CITY ships tomorrow. Pre-order today. Every pre-order counts toward launch-week rankings, which is how a book about cities gets in front of readers beyond one city. If you've been waiting, this is the day.

Join me for two upcoming Austin conversations and book signings:

Tuesday, September 8 at First Light Books. Doors open at 6:00 PM, with my conversation with Congressman Greg Casar beginning at 6:30 PM.

Monday, September 14 at 7:00 PM at Birdhouse Books, in conversation with Sarah Adler Hartman, CEO of The Texas Tribune.

Pre-order and RSVP details are in the first comment.

08/21/2026

HOT SEAT, HOT CITY: The Austin Mayor's Story
In national politics, you can posture. In local government, you must perform.

There's no hiding behind slogans when the streets flood, or when you have to tell your community to boil the water before drinking it. There's no blaming the other side when the rent keeps rising. The mayor is the first one blamed and the first one called, not because the mayor holds all the power, but because the mayor is expected to act. That proximity is brutal. It's also the gift: it breeds a kind of accountability that no other level of American government still has. Chapter 18, the book's closing argument, is what eight years in that seat taught me about what democratic leadership actually requires.

The chapter's central claim: trust matters more than alignment. A city can survive disagreement; it can survive defeat. What it cannot survive is people concluding that no one is telling them the truth. And you cannot out-argue a lie with a spreadsheet. I tried. You can only outlast it: standing in the room, repeatedly, telling the truth calmly, admitting what you don't know, and showing that your motives are honest even when your answers are incomplete. People don't trust numbers. They trust people. Real listening means learning the fears underneath positions you can't support, addressing the whys even when you'll disagree on the whats.

After eight years, here's the simplest thing I know: local government is neighbors helping neighbors solve problems too big for any one household. People of wildly different politics still stand shoulder to shoulder because they share the same storm drain and watch their kids play in the same park. While national politics performs its dysfunction, the local is where American democracy still works, and where its repair will begin. That's the case this whole book builds, and Chapter 18 closes it.

HOT SEAT, HOT CITY ships Tuesday. Pre-order today and it's on your doorstep launch week.

Join me for two upcoming Austin conversations and book signings:

Tuesday, September 8 at First Light Books. Doors open at 6:00 PM, with my conversation with Congressman Greg Casar beginning at 6:30 PM.

Monday, September 14 at 7:00 PM at Birdhouse Books, in conversation with Sarah Adler Hartman, CEO of The Texas Tribune.

Pre-order and RSVP details are in the first comment.

08/19/2026

HOT SEAT — HOT CITY: The Austin Mayor's Story
The speech I couldn't write about myself — so I put someone else's words in the book

A memoir has a built-in problem: the author grades his own homework. So the book ends with an appendix I didn't write — remarks Congressman Greg Casar delivered on Congress Avenue in December 2022, as my time as mayor ended. Greg served six years on the council with me before going to Congress. We didn't agree on everything; that's partly why his words are in the book. He opens by noting I could run a seventeen-hour council meeting without anyone ever figuring out when I went to the bathroom. (A mayor guards his operational secrets.)

What moved me most in his remarks wasn't the list of public accomplishments — transit, climate, housing. It was his argument that the real measure of the office is what a mayor does for the people who will never make the newspaper: the construction workers and hotel cleaners who got better wages and health care, the families who avoided eviction, the parents who didn't get deported and whose kids will grow up to be Austin's teachers and scientists and, someday, its council members. As Greg put it — the people who aren't in the room. Whether I met that measure isn't mine to judge. But it's the right measure, and I wanted it in the book, stated by someone accountable for his own words.

His closing line is the one I'll carry: "Mayor, we are going to miss you." Publishing praise of yourself is an awkward business — so read the appendix skeptically, the way you'd read anything. But read it. It's six pages, it's the view from the seat next to the hot one, and it answers a question the other eighteen chapters can't: what does the inside look like from the just outside?

HOT SEAT — HOT CITY ships in six days — August 25.

📖 Pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Seat-Austin-Mayors-Story/dp/B0GS6RJ6Y7 · 🌐 MayorAdler.com

08/17/2026

HOT SEAT — HOT CITY: The Austin Mayor's Story
"If you don't run, I don't want to hear you complaining about city hall ever again."

That was my wife Diane, December 2013, pointing her finger at me. A group of us had tried to recruit someone — someone good — to run for mayor of Austin. Some very qualified said no. Diane and I had spent decades on nonprofit boards watching city hall decisions ripple through the causes we cared about, and I had become an accomplished complainer about it. She called my bluff. Thirty days later, I was a candidate. (She also said running would be like our nonprofit work together, "only at a bigger scale." We had no idea how different it would really be.)

The timing mattered. Austin was switching from an at-large council to ten geographic districts — the biggest change in the city's governing structure in generations, one that finally gave lower-turnout, less-advantaged parts of town equal representation. Nearly the whole council would be new. The city needed a special kind of mayor.

One early scene from that race stayed with me. A well-qualified candidate — accomplished, well-liked, someone I genuinely respected — invited me to coffee and opened with: get out of the race. "I'm going to beat you, and I will spend whatever it takes to win." Chapter 6 is about what it actually takes for a private citizen to run for office: the recruitment, the doubts, the strange arithmetic of a long runoff, and why I still tell my students that if the qualified people all say no, the question isn't "why me?" — it's "then who?"

HOT SEAT — HOT CITY ships in eight days — August 25.

📖 Pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Seat-Austin-Mayors-Story/dp/B0GS6RJ6Y7 · 🌐 MayorAdler.com

08/15/2026

HOT SEAT — HOT CITY: The Austin Mayor's Story
My political career began in fourth grade. It didn't start well.

I was elected president of my fourth-grade class on a two-plank platform: bigger school lunches and a shorter school year. Armed with my mandate, I wrote directly to the superintendent of a 100,000-student district — and got called to the principal's office for a stern lecture on the chain of command. The superintendent's written reply explained that plenty of food gets thrown away, and if I was still hungry I should just ask for more. He'd missed the point entirely: I wasn't asking for myself. I was asking for my class. Sixty years later, I'm still a little mad about it.

Four chapters of the book tell the story of how a kid raised in Kensington, Maryland ended up leading the fastest-growing city in America — and they're full of the accidents that make a life. A seventy-year-old Princeton fencing coach who recruited walk-ons by showing up at the campus pub carrying four pitchers of b**r, and who changed my life with a 4 a.m. phone call. A Texan named Tiny (I never learned his real name) who talked up Texas so relentlessly at a Princeton reunion that I ended up at UT Law — where tuition was $8 a semester hour. Two Navy-vet buddies with waist-length hair who picked me up at the Austin airport in 1978 and welcomed me to Texas in a manner I probably shouldn't detail on LinkedIn. It's in the book.

There's a harder thread in these chapters too. My father died when I was 21 — I sat beside his hospital bed for a month of one-way conversations. My mother followed six years later. My siblings and I weren't sure our gene pool would get us past fifty-three; we celebrated mightily when my brother turned fifty-four. When your parents die young, a clock starts ticking that never stops. That clock is a clue as to why I've spent my whole life trying to do too much in too little time — and it's also why, decades later, a mayor who knew exactly how many minutes he had left in office refused to waste any of them.

HOT SEAT — HOT CITY ships in ten days — August 25.

📖 Pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Seat-Austin-Mayors-Story/dp/B0GS6RJ6Y7 · 🌐 MayorAdler.com

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