Mayor Eric Adams’ announcement Sunday that he will stop running for re-election closes the book on a fruitful and frustrating four years for real estate.
His decision, revealed in a video posted on X, might seem like a final gift to the industry, but it figures to only slightly improve Andrew Cuomo’s chances to defeat Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani in the November election.
Adams was drawing support from only 7 percent or 8 percent of voters in recent polls. Even if most of those voters migrate to Cuomo, some will shift to Mamdani or Republican Curtis Sliwa, and some will simply not vote. Some might even vote for Adams, whose name may still appear on the ballot.
As a result, Cuomo, who trails Mamdani by 18 to 20 points in the most recent polls, figures to pick up just 3 or 4 points from Adams’ withdrawal.
The lost promise of Adams’ mayoralty could haunt the real estate industry for years, especially if Mamdani wins and lives up to his campaign platform of freezing rents and opposing profit-making by developers.
Adams’ re-election campaign was fatally wounded by his September 2023 corruption indictment and his dalliance with President Donald Trump in a successful effort to get the charges dropped.
But his popularity had already plummeted, thanks to scandals involving his confidantes, which continued even after the Department of Justice abandoned the case against Adams in exchange for his cooperation on immigration enforcement.
Some of Adams’ accomplishments, however, will benefit the real estate industry for decades to come. No mayor in modern history has done more to increase the potential for more housing in the city.
Adams’ City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, which passed a year ago, will spur the addition of an estimated 82,000 more homes over 15 years. How much credit the mayor deserves for it, however, is a complicated question.
The bulk of the work on City of Yes was done by his Department of City Planning and its director Dan Garodnick, a former City Council member who touted the reform to New Yorkers and Council members when the mayor was too unpopular and distracted to do either.
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, although she has clashed repeatedly with the mayor, played a crucial role in tweaking City of Yes to ensure at least 26 members would vote for the proposal, which passed 31 to 20. A more popular mayor might have been able to get it through without the concessions that shaved about 27,000 homes off the projected gain.
But had the mayor not endorsed the plan and given Garodnick rein to make it happen, it wouldn’t have. City of Yes modernized zoning and other regulations that had long ceased to make sense, if they ever did, yet were kept in place by Mayors Bill de Blasio, Mike Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch, all of whom considered themselves reformers.
The changes allowed for a little more housing in every neighborhood. One key reform was eliminating parking requirements for new developments in much of the city; the original proposal would have done so citywide.
Adams got off to a slow start on rezoning neighborhoods for more housing, but his understaffed planning department got the ball rolling in his third year. By the time he leaves office, Adams will have presided over upzonings of Midtown South, Long Island City, Jamaica, the former Flushing Airport, Atlantic Avenue from Prospect Heights to Crown Heights, and sections of the Bronx where four Metro-North stations are planned.
The mayor also did more than his predecessors in pushing for city office buildings to be converted into housing, although much of that effort came late in his tenure, leaving delivery of those promises to his successor.
The Adams administration lobbied Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature for a change that housing advocates have sought for years: an increase in the city’s maximum floor-area ratio, which had been stuck at 12 for ages. With a push from the governor, the state finally did so in the spring of 2024, allowing for a more robust Midtown South rezoning, with FAR being raised to 15 on some blocks and 18 on others.
As a result, the rezoning could yield 10,000 new homes.
Under Adams, the New York City Housing Authority has accelerated the de Blasio administration’s PACT program, which enlists private real estate firms to renovate and manage NYCHA campuses. The program, conceived by former HUD secretary Shaun Donovan in 2011, has made improvements to public housing that long seemed impossible.
As part of that effort, NYCHA is moving ahead with the Related Companies on a demolish-and-rebuild project for the Fulton Houses, despite opposition from some Chelsea residents that had caused the de Blasio administration to back off.
The Rent Guidelines Board, which over time came to be controlled by Adams appointees, abandoned the rent freezes of the de Blasio years and passed increases for rent-stabilized properties that at least approached the rate of inflation.
Landlords appreciated Adams’ refusal to make them scapegoats for the city’s high housing costs, and his repeated explanations that rent has to keep pace with expenses.
On the other hand, Adams made little effort to advocate in Albany for rent-stabilized buildings, which have lost billions of dollars in value since the state’s rent law reform of 2019.
In recent months, Adams has been promoting himself as the most pro-housing mayor ever, based on changes championed by his administration. “We’re going to build more housing in one term than [in] the 12 years under Bloomberg [and] the eight years under de Blasio combined,” he said.
That wasn’t accurate. What he meant was his rezonings and the City of Yes created the potential for 130,000 new homes, more than his two predecessors’ rezonings did. The actual creation of those homes, if they happen, will be after Adams leaves office, either at year’s end or sooner if he resigns to accept a new job.
But mayors do not, for the most part, create much housing. Their responsibility is to create the conditions that allow the private sector to build. On that standard, Adams can stake a claim as the most pro-housing mayor, even if fair comparisons are impossible because the city’s challenges and circumstances change dramatically from one mayor to the next.
Koch’s great accomplishment was restoring New Yorkers’ optimism about the city, and reclaiming thousands of buildings abandoned during the city’s years of crisis. Giuliani presided over an unprecedented decline in crime, which raised real estate values more than any housing policy could.
Bloomberg’s 12 years — despite starting with a recession and being interrupted by the Great Financial Crisis — were marked by record job increases, which rewarded landlords with higher rents than had ever been imagined. And de Blasio’s policies embraced market-rate development as necessary to alleviate the housing crisis, although he rarely acknowledged that, lest he be cast as catering to real estate.
Adams was more vocal about housing than any of them. He often derided the persistent not-in-my-back-yard opposition to housing from local communities and their representatives, and never sought to score political points by demonizing the real estate industry.
But in the end, that promise was cut short by his own mistakes and misdeeds. While he did bring in respected deputy mayors, including Maria Torres-Springer, who was in charge of housing, Adams also hired cronies from his time in the NYPD, Brooklyn Borough Hall and the state Senate, and let them engage in all kinds of self-dealing.
They seemed to take their cue from the mayor himself, judging from the 57-page indictment released by federal prosecutors, which showed Adams approving straw-donor deals and quid pro quo exchanges for first-class travel to Turkey. Adams denied everything, but New Yorkers didn’t believe him, and he never recovered.
The upshot was a mayoralty that began with great optimism for real estate interest, then fell apart in a cloud of scandal, but ultimately did a lot of good things for the industry and for New Yorkers who need housing.
Most of that housing will be realized in the years to come, although given the way his mayoralty ended, it is unclear if Adams will be remembered for it.
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