What Did Eric Adams Build As Mayor?

Review Eric Adams’s public statements this year, and you will learn from his comms team that he is the most pro-housing mayor in history. “Mayor Adams’ Administration Shatters Affordable Housing Records (Again),” read one release, claiming that the administration “has created, preserved, or planned approximately 426,800 homes through its efforts to date.” Pretty good! Yet somehow, you look around the city and it’s hard to see where those nearly half a million apartments are. Did Eric Adams, in four years, really get more housing done than Robert Moses and four mayors did between 1940 and 1960, the golden era of NYCHA construction? Did he build more in that one term than Fiorello La Guardia did in three?

Sure, some of that is his well-established taste for swagger. But it does provide an opportunity to ask, as the mayor’s term draws to a close: What did Eric Adams really build? And the short answer is: Less than you’d hope, but more than you might think.

Inarguably, he’s leaving a few systems a lot better than he found them. If the Adams administration is going to be remembered for one thing (besides the mayor’s highly spirited public persona), it’s probably the big improvements to trash collection. Containerization is a huge conceptual shift in a city where real estate is tight and alleyways are few and the fleet of trucks is immense. Even the man who vanquished him, Zohran Mamdani, agrees that on this issue, Adams sits at the table of success. Some of that is likely owed to improvements under Kathryn Garcia, the Sanitation commissioner who preceded his mayoralty (and nearly became mayor herself), and then the high-energy leadership of Jessica Tisch, now police commissioner. The rat curve, a good measure of success in this realm, appears to be bending in the right direction. Likewise scaffolding reform: Everyone hates sidewalk sheds (except my colleague Adriane Quinlan, as well as the rest of us during the occasional sudden downpour), and they are beginning to come down, at least in fits and starts. The new designs are nice, too.

When it comes to streetscape building, the Adams years have been middling, falling well short of the mayor’s own stated goals, like those 300 bike lanes and 1,000 daylighted intersections. The fundamental shift in transportation philosophy that began during the Bloomberg years — away from prioritizing cars and trucks over every other kind of transportation — is now entrenched, and this mayoralty, to its credit, did not throw a DOGE into the works and undo it all. There has been an array of small-bore improvements, like the sections of Broadway that have been pedestrianized south of the Flatiron Building and the rehab of the Arches, the Lower East Side skaters’ mecca next to the Brooklyn Bridge. More projects in that vein are either in the study phase, like the remaking of 14th Street, or the funded-and-imminent phase, like the 34th Street busway (although that one’s temporarily on ice owing to the Trump administration) and the big forthcoming Fifth Avenue redesign. A lot of public-private partnership development has happened around Brooklyn’s Broadway Junction, too, notably the big building on Fulton Street that Adams first got behind as borough president.

On the other hand, the outdoor-dining program pioneered during the pandemic was a golden once-in-a-century shot to claw back some pavement from cars for good in favor of a little streetside café culture, and now it’s mostly gone. Yes, the administration wrote it into law, but red tape and seasonality limits have pushed restaurateurs away — why require a separate liquor license, for example? — and few are participating. Per Gothamist, just 600 restaurants and bars citywide put up dining structures this summer, and any New Yorker who was here in 2020 can see that streeteries are mostly a thing of the past. That’s a lost opportunity for sure. And the huge and necessary thing we did not get — a replacement of the city-owned portion of the BQE before it crumbles into the East River — grows more urgent every year. It’s Mamdani’s (big, hairy, increasingly expensive) problem now.

If you were to ask Adams himself about his achievements, I suspect that he’d say his housing initiatives, and specifically the City of Yes program, will be his legacy. That total of 426,800 units (again, “created, preserved, or planned”) basically counts everything that could be built under the various zoning changes that have been enacted. The actual number of homes produced in these years via the Department of Housing Preservation and Development is, per City Hall, nearly 86,000 — certainly not nothing, especially if you are one of those 86,000 families. The housing advocate Sam Stein, who works on policy at the Community Service Society, noted to me that the total includes upticks at the bottom and top of the cost curve, too — that is, a slightly more substantial number of units built for the lowest and highest eligible income brackets. (That makes sense, he told me: “You spend less on the high-income units, and then you have more to spend on the low-income units, so it balances out.”) As an aside, he pointed out to me that the apartments in someplace like Hudson Yards — approved under Bloomberg, built mostly under de Blasio, and completed under Adams — may justifiably be counted in all three mayors’ totals. Apartments like those are, he joked to me, “extremely preserved housing.”

Adams somewhat outbuilt Bill de Blasio, who got about 50,000 new apartments up during his two terms, and played some of the same rhetorical game when announcing 200,000 units built or preserved. (“Preserved,” in this case, included for example presiding over the refinancing of Stuyvesant Town’s 12,000 apartments while retaining stabilized status for many of them — a civic good, but also not quite what it sounds like on the surface.) Both Adams’s and de Blasio’s totals stay ahead of the number of housing units lost in any given year, but the additions have made only a small dent in the yawning need. The accessory-dwelling-unit law is a fine idea as well, but it doesn’t really do much statistically: As of earlier this month, a mere 98 of them were underway. The vacancy rate citywide remains well under 2 percent, considerably less for rent-stabilized apartments. Everything’s full.

In fact, when it comes to building anything, the Adams legacy remains up for grabs, and there’s a reason for that. Four years, to put it simply, is not enough to get a shovel in the ground on anything really huge. Andrew Cuomo had two-and-a-half terms to work with before his downfall, and it took that plus a nearly limitless supply of aggression to get a subway line open and an airport rebuilt from the inside out. Had he been voted out after one term, LGA would most likely not look like this. So it perhaps will go with Adams’s City of Yes: We will finally get a bead on what it has produced around 2035. You can look forward to reading “Assessing Eric Adams: 10 Years Later” in a special direct-to-brain downloadable edition of Curbed.

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