Did Eric Adams Out-Build Bloomberg and de Blasio Combined?

12 minutes read

Last week, in a relentless onslaught of interviews to kick off his re-election campaign, Mayor Eric Adams rattled off a rather surprising statement:

“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.”

On its face, that sounded impossible. More housing built in four years than in 20? His interviewers on the Odd Lots podcast didn’t press him to explain.

They should have. It’s not like Mike Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio were not focused on housing — both had bold-sounding housing plans and met their targets.

Bloomberg aimed to preserve or create 165,000 units of affordable housing, and at the end of his 12 years he announced that he did 160,000.

De Blasio set a goal of 200,000 affordable units created or preserved and declared in December 2021 that he had succeeded. (His initial plan also included 180,000 market-rate units, but — perhaps afraid of being blamed for gentrification — he never mentioned it again.)

I knew Adams didn’t top 360,000 affordable units. I also knew the number of homes of all types built each year ranges from 12,000 to 28,000, so even 20 terrible years would yield twice as many units as four great years.

Therefore, Adams must have been talking about something else. So I checked with City Hall. A spokesperson told me the mayor was comparing the number of units that his rezonings would eventually add to the expected totals of his two predecessors’ rezonings.

That framework favors Adams because he passed the only citywide rezoning, City of Yes, which is projected to create 80,000 more units than would have otherwise been built over 15 years. To that, he adds 50,000 units from two completed rezonings (around the planned Bronx Metro-North stations and the Atlantic Avenue corridor in Brooklyn) and three pending ones (Long Island City, Midtown South and Jamaica).

That does indeed total more units (130,000) than the 68,000 expected from de Blasio’s eight neighborhood rezonings and the 32,000 from Bloomberg’s, which include Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Park Slope, Long Island City and others.

Few if any of those 130,000 units will be built during Adams’ first term, so listeners should not take the statement “We’re going to build more housing in one term” literally.

It’s common for politicians to be loose with their language when they turn complicated facts into bumper stickers, but Adams could do better. I would suggest instead, “We’re going to rezone for more housing in one term than Bloomberg and de Blasio did in five.”

I read a bit more of the Odd Lots transcript to see if Adams’ liberal phrasing was an outlier. I didn’t get far before I came across this boast: “We’re also doing the RAD program. Many people have attempted to do it. We got it done.”

RAD — Rental Assistance Demonstration — was in fact created by Shawn Donovan (the Bloomberg/Obama housing czar who lost the primary to Adams in 2021), implemented by de Blasio and expanded by Adams. It has moved tens of thousands of New York City Housing Authority units from Section 9 to Section 8, and to private property managers, with good results.

Does Adams’ statement give the impression that he succeeded where his predecessors failed? I would say so. But he deserves credit for pushing ahead with RAD despite hysterical opposition from paranoid activists.

I also give Adams credit for getting City of Yes and the Bronx rezonings done in his third year and Atlantic Avenue done during his fourth, even if his Department of City Planning did most of the heavy lifting while Adams was bogged down by his indictment.

That said, they should have been done sooner, along with Jamaica and Long Island City. In his first two and a half years in office, Adams did a lot of clubbing at Zero Bond but zero rezonings.

The main point here, though, is that when politicians speak, be skeptical — especially if the interviewers don’t cut through the spin. They rarely do.