It was a chilly November afternoon in Central Park, and before his class at Hunter College, the potential next mayor of New York City needed to record himself crunching leaves.
Despite us both being students at Hunter, I’ve never encountered Kyle Gutierrez, 21, until I recently heard through the grapevine about his intentions to campaign. I was overwhelmed with curiosity. What 21-year-old runs for mayor? Surely, someone who takes himself way too seriously, with delusions of grandeur. On Instagram, mutual friends posted photos with him at baseball games and house parties, sporting leather boots and cropped tops. On LinkedIn, his profile picture is a mirror selfie of him in a suit, and his header is an Arctic Monkeys album cover.
However, my curiosity wasn’t at all satiated when I met with Gutierrez on the third floor of Hunter’s West Building. Immediately, he went for a hug. On the outside, he was just like any other student on campus. A fuzzy sweater, well-loved sneakers, and curly black hair with painted white nails. But unbeknownst to most of his over 20,000 peers, his grand ambitions may impact all of their lives. He wants to become the youngest and first-ever Independent mayor of New York City.
With the little spare time Gutierrez has before his 7 p.m class, he has to record ambient noises of Central Park to accompany the campaign video he filmed there just a few weeks ago. So we walked there.
Initially, Gutierrez explained to me that he wanted to film the video in all five boroughs. But it was hard finding a time that worked with his team– as of now, composed of his friends– to meet, so he had to film in the span of one day.
“You have to be a little bit delusional,” said Gutierrez about running for mayor. “You have to be a big dreamer and have high ambitions that seem unrealistic. Shoot for the stars, run for the moon kind of thing.”
Gutierrez was born and raised 90 minutes north of the city in the village of Warwick, a conservative farm town where Gutierrez quickly stood out for his views. Growing up, Gutierrez had a natural relationship to the spotlight, as he was a self-proclaimed theater kid. But he aspired to have a career in politics, partially due to his father who openly voiced his own political leanings to him at a young age.
When Gutierrez was 10, his father told him that he was an Independent.
“I was like, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’” he said.
But it started churning the gears of his brain, so he decided to learn about and invest in political parties and their values. He religiously attended his local town halls as a high school student, where the feeling of advocating on behalf of his town’s youth made it easy to envision this as his future. However, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the government’s response “turned him off” from his career goal.
Ultimately, Gutierrez needed a change from his small town. Warwick was a stop on his journey, the next was New York City.
He moved to the Upper East Side and enrolled at Hunter through the Macaulay Honors program, which shifted Gutierrez back to his original ambitions in politics. He joined the NYC Student Union, a coalition of college students organizing for the REPAIR Act, demanding Columbia and New York University to pay $327 million in property taxes that would be disbursed to the CUNY system.
But a union wasn’t enough— he needed to make a direct change to his community, and the local office was the outlet to do it.
In January 2024, he became a Legislative and Constituent Services Intern for the office of Assembly member Alex Bores, and just a few months later became a fellow for him, where he conducted policy research and wrote memos.
But working under the office exposed him to its downsides– the problems within government lie not within elected officials, but the people who aren’t elected. As Gutierrez tried to help constituents, he received little support from some of his colleagues.
“People have this stigma that government’s ineffective, but they place all the blame on elected officials and politicians,” he said. “But it’s really the departments, and to the department’s defense, a lot of them are underfunded and understaffed, as opposed to certain departments that are overfunded and overstaffed.”
There were whispers that Bores was running for Manhattan Borough President. When this came to the ears of Gutierrez, he joked with coworkers about entering the race to be a “rogue pick” for the Manhattan Borough President spot.
“What if you just ran for mayor?” they teased him.
But between the lines of jest, sparked a serious consideration for Gutierrez, who decided this summer to run. Because ultimately, what is really the harm? The worst thing that happens, he said, is that he doesn’t win.
As our cheeks turned red and our breaths released smoke, he started getting flustered.
“I think that the way young people are viewed in politics is like, ‘Oh, they’re the future. You guys have to fix the mess that we created.’ But it’s like, why do we have to be the future? Why can’t we just be the now?” he said.
To run for New York City mayor, a candidate needs to be a U.S citizen of 18 years old. But Gutierrez needed to know the tangible details, such as paperwork. Within the next couple of weeks, Gutierrez needs to collect 2500 signatures supporting his campaign in the Upper East Side, though he is not worried about this. Hunter College, located in the area, has a student body of 24,000.
“I think there will be people that would genuinely support me, and then there’ll be the people that support me in a meme way, like, ‘I want to see what this kid does,’” he said. “And I also have a very great, supportive network of friends and colleagues that will also want to help me.”
Gutierrez is running alongside many established local city government politicians, such as Comptroller Brad Lander, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and former governor Andrew Cuomo. But he faces the unique circumstance of being a direct opponent of Mayor Eric Adams, who announced his entry into the race as an Independent this April.
However, Gutierrez is not intimidated by this, and even eagerly awaits the opportunity to debate him.
“I feel like what makes a good politician and a good legislator are intrinsic things you can’t teach. It’s critical thinking skills, empathy, adaptability and openness to learn while also not folding under pressure from people that don’t care about others,” he said. “I would not want to drag him through the coals. I wouldn’t want to put him down to make myself feel better. I’d rather bring in statistics and facts.”
Gutierrez’s campaign is not intended to solely focus on his personal ambitions. He wants his platform to be a resource for people, such as letting New York City residents know of resources they may not be aware of, like the operation hours of soup kitchens nearby. His Squarespace website addresses his policies and positions in the form of a “blog,” where people can ask him questions and know him more intimately as a candidate.
“People complain about how Republicans spread misinformation but then what are Democrats doing to counteract that misinformation? They just, like, kind of let it exist. They don’t go out and educate people,” he said.
Lowkey, he realized, you have to be an influencer. As he does not expect much donation money to fund his campaign, social media and utilizing his network will be an integral component to his race.
Ideally, his goal is to accumulate enough funds to host a mayoral rally serving as a potluck for attendees (housed and unhoused), as food insecurity is one of his key target issues.
For Gutierrez, his age does not phase him as a deterrent for voters. The ultimate goal of his campaign is to display the antithesis of politics, his authenticity.
“Fuck Donald Trump. But if you talk to any conservative person, the reason that they like Donald Trump is because he’s not like other politicians. He’s authentic. He’s an authentic piece of shit, but he is, unfortunately, very authentically himself,” he said.
We stopped our conversation so Gutierrez could record his sound effects. The sun had completely sunk by now, and the skyline that peaks beneath the trees twinkled. As quickly as my recording button stopped and his turned on, Gutierrez started jumping into large piles of crisp leaves. His laptop, which was on, displayed the Garageband interface where all of his campaign video audio was on.
After several minutes of flicking branches, rustling leaves, and putting his phone into trees and tall rocks (that gave me much anxiety), he was out of breath. He sipped from my water bottle, but we decided to walk to Hunter’s beloved bubble tea spot, GongCha.
In line waiting to order, I asked Gutierrez what he would do in his first 100 days as mayor if elected.
Without tangible restrictions, he said, his most immediate concerns would be to open more mental health centers and other facilities in order to address the concerns of the growing homeless population.
“Most of the homeless population is homeless because they never got sufficient care for their mental health issues, or their addiction,” Gutierrez said.
His policies do not surprise me— they range from addressing issues such as climate change to the MTA— adjacent to the average CUNY student’s concerns.
Like many Gen-Zers, climate change is on Gutierrez’s mind, who wants to set higher standards for greenhouse gas mitigation. During his time walking on the East River walkway, he noticed major infrastructure issues between Harlem and the Upper East Side, where some parts are “crumbling and under construction,” which is an issue when it comes to rising sea levels.
“I’m fucking terrified of climate change, I hate that people kind of act like it’s not this thing that is gonna fucking happen and kill us all,” he said. “But we especially need to think about equity when it comes to climate change. People of color and people in lower socioeconomic statuses are the ones that are more affected.”
Ultimately, of course, the elephant in the room is housing.
“Housing is something that is gonna take a big fucking time, unfortunately,” he agreed. “But if I could do anything, rent freezes are the first thing that comes to mind. We don’t need to build more houses. There’s so many vacant apartments in New York City that landlords poured in because they can make more money with the scarcity principle of housing. T-B-H, we don’t need to open up all these homeless shelters. They’re a band-aid solution to the fact that we have housing, it’s just not available literally because of private corporations, which is ridiculous.”
An idea he has toyed with is implementing more restrictive measures for landlords to increase the stakes of holding vacant apartments, such as revoking their properties if they have a certain number of vacancies.
We continued to talk about his policies and of Mayor Adams until it was time for Gutierrez to go to class. We stop in front of the West building, briefly exchanging our goodbyes before we depart our separate ways.
Recently, I was giving a tour of Hunter to some out-of-state friends when I heard the chanting across the street from us. It’s the familiar cries to free Palestine, which have died out since last semester.
I knew it was partly the work of the NYC Student Union. Because he was there, on the frontlines rallying on their behalf.
Since I last met with Gutierrez that chilly day in November, spring has swept the Upper East Side, and he has since launched his campaign. On his Instagram platform, he emulates an approach similar to Mamdani’s strategy. His videos, filmed on the streets of New York or on Hunters campus, aim to educate New Yorkers on current city issues while connecting it to how he would address them.
On campus, Gutierrez hands out stickers on the skybridge and makes appearances anywhere he can– one being a Battle of the Bands event hosted by the Where Hunter College Speaks radio station. As people moshed in front of Gutierrez in the Thomas Hunter Game Room, he sports a g-string and performs covers as well as original songs with his band– “ABCDEFGH.”
But his ambitions remain set for the mayoral throne, and the challenges are clear to him.
If anything, he is more nervous for his finals than the primaries.
The Envoy 
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