Grading Mayor Adams on real estate

“How’m I doing?” was Mayor Ed Koch’s signature line. Five mayors later, Eric Adams does not ask that question. He seems to feel he’s doing a bang-up job.

Not quite.

Adams has had some successes, but like all mayors, has made mistakes. Because real estate has a lot riding on Adams, the industry is hurt by his blunders, even the ones unrelated to it.

We shouldn’t lose sight of the big picture, which is that the mayor’s goals and policies align with the industry’s. There was no guarantee that New York City would get such a mayor and not a far-left idealist in the 2021 election, which is why real estate players backed Adams.

The issue for building owners, developers and even brokers is more about Adams’ ability to execute.

The mayor wants to build more homes. He wants a tax break to offset the high property taxes on new apartment buildings. He wants the city to be safe and clean — and perceived that way.

He wants less red tape. And he seems willing to make city government leaner, except for the NYPD.

These are real estate’s priorities, too. But in grading Adams, we must also take into account his success in achieving them.

His popularity matters, because high approval ratings help elected officials deliver on their agendas. That is why Adams’ performance outside of real estate issues is important, too.

Let’s break it down.

Scandals. The mayor has avoided disasters like the Crown Heights riots that sank David Dinkins or the Parking Violations Bureau corruption that crippled Ed Koch’s final term. But Adams has been plagued by nagging controversies and other distractions, often of his own making.

He has hired a bunch of relatives, including his brother and sister-in-law, for high-paying city jobs. The nepotism is amateurish, arrogant and reminiscent of the clownish community school boards of the 1980s and 1990s. It conveys an attitude that perception doesn’t matter, which it certainly does.

Compounding the Adams family enrichment problem, Adams plays fast and loose with facts. He has misled New Yorkers on a variety of things where the plain truth would have bothered no one. Who cares if he’s a vegetarian, keeps a photo of a late colleague in his pocket or still owns a Brooklyn apartment? People just want honesty, and a mea culpa when one is justified.

In politics, staying on message is crucial, but the mayor has given the media all kinds of other stuff to cover. They will always focus on the sexiest story of the day. So when Adams advocates for more housing, the call is drowned out by the noise.

When the New York Times found that an Adams aide doctored a photo to pass off as one Adams said he carried in his wallet, the mayor played the victim. Rather than just say the aide showed bad judgment, his press office attacked the Times as evil and racist. It was a comical response to a legitimate piece and dragged out what would have been a one-day story.

Grade: B-

Management. Adams has been wracked by high-level personnel departures. The pace of early resignations has been unprecedented in the modern history of City Hall. Commissioners and senior aides are expected to stay for at least the first four-year term, yet many didn’t even get halfway. The mayor has tried to pass this off as normal. Nobody is fooled.

Even aides to Bill de Blasio, who hated the way their boss blamed them for his mistakes, stuck around for years.

Adams’ micromanagement helps explain the exodus. Michael Bloomberg empowered commissioners to improve their agencies, but Adams wouldn’t even let his police commissioner ding a subordinate 10 vacation days. She called Adams’ bluff and resigned. No mayor’s first police chief had ever left so quickly.

Adams stripped housing from the title of the deputy mayor for economic development and instead appointed a “chief housing officer,” Jessica Katz, with nebulous authority. This sent the wrong signal about housing, which Adams had campaigned on but largely ignored in his first year.

When Katz quit, the mayor returned housing to a deputy mayor’s portfolio — an acknowledgement that dividing the jobs was a mistake.

Grade: C+

Crime. Armchair quarterbacks and pundits claim to know why crime goes up or down. They don’t. Even criminologists struggle to show cause and effect. So don’t blame the mayor for crime increases or credit him for decreases, both of which have occurred in his first two years. Look instead at what he can control.

For about a year, the mayor called attention to crime by visiting homicide scenes and booking media appearances. As a result, many New Yorkers (and outsiders) thought crime was a lot worse than it really was. Adams blamed the media for that. Hello?

The mayor finally pivoted to talking about how safe the city is. Did he exaggerate crime early so he could take credit for fixing it? Or to get an NYPD budget increase through a progressive City Council (at least 20 of its 51 members are “defund” advocates)? I’m not sure he’s that Machiavellian, but real estate was happy with the result. Property owners always want more cops.

Public safety remains Adams’ superpower. As a former cop who fought for police reforms and overcame discrimination, he can be pro-cop without seeming like a sell-out, except to the far left.

Grade: A-

Housing politics, City Council. The mayor believes, correctly, that the city needs far more housing. That may seem obvious, but some New Yorkers insist that rent goes up because of developers and landlords.

For the record: Rents are determined by what New Yorkers are willing to pay, which is a lot. Why? Because their choices are limited, and they bid against each other. Adams gets that. Unfortunately, he largely ignored the issue until a 917-unit Harlem project was killed in June 2022.

Since then, however, Adams has called out opponents of new housing. His predecessor, Bill de Blasio never did that, giving NIMBYs carte blanche to block projects and rezonings — even those de Blasio favored. Adams should not have waited 18 months, but he’s been making up for lost time.

However, public statements only go so far. A mayor must also work behind the scenes to ensure that City Council members, borough presidents and community boards encourage or at least allow development. Adams appears to devote far more time to flag-raising ceremonies.

Grade: B+

Housing politics, Albany:

The mayor gets an A for advocating for pro-housing policies in Albany and a C for failing to get anything passed besides a re-start of the J-51 tax abatement. And the new J-51 requires so much affordability that landlords might wholly ignore it.

Perhaps Albany was beyond hope. Gov. Kathy Hochul couldn’t get her housing agenda passed either. Still, we have to judge Adams not just by his positions but by the results.

Grade: B

Zoning:

Rezonings would empower developers to create market-rate and affordable units, thanks to de Blasio’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing law. But Adams has not passed a single one. Those he has proposed are good but not designed to supercharge housing production, which is essential to curb bidding wars by renters and buyers.

We are still waiting for rezonings around the four Metro-North stations planned for the Bronx. The public review is supposed to begin in the next four months. We’re told a Garment Center rezoning is coming to convert offices to homes.

The Department of City Planning is also working on a Prospect Heights and Crown Heights rezoning with City Council member Crystal Hudson — a big test, given that she began her tenure by killing two big apartment projects.

Adams’ planning czar, Dan Garodnick, has a strong grasp of the issue but it will be well into 2024, at the earliest, before anything gets passed. Too slow. That’s on Adams.

Grade: B-

Subsidized housing:

Staff shortages at the mayor’s housing agencies narrowed the affordable housing pipeline in the mayor’s first year. The agencies have since returned to their previous pace, which is still not enough.

If only Adams had more relatives needing jobs, these vacancies would have been filled. On a serious note, he can’t be blamed for the tight labor market. Adams has his administration hold monthly job fairs around the city and attends them in person, which is admirable.

Grade: B

Sidewalk sheds:

It’s insane that so much of New York is shackled in sidewalk sheds and scaffolding. No other city is, and it’s not because they don’t have old, masonry buildings and pedestrians walking under them.

Adams’ crackerjack buildings commissioner, Jimmy Oddo, is determined to end this scourge. The initial strategy relies mostly on fines — not the most creative solution — but does include efforts to improve regulation, which has contributed to the problem. At least Adams has put it on the front burner, which de Blasio never did.

Grade: B+

Rats:

No mayor took rats seriously until Adams. Rather than just doing easy stuff that doesn’t work, such as stuffing hawk-killing poison into rat burrows, Adams is attempting the only true solution: removing rodents’ food supply from city sidewalks.

It’s a heavy lift, literally and figuratively. Putting rat-proof trash bins on curbs is a foreign concept for New Yorkers. But people said the same thing about Bloomberg’s smoking ban in bars and restaurants, which has made bars and restaurants more popular. It’s been great for retail landlords — and for real estate in general.

Getting trash bags and rats off the curb will boost the industry as well. A clean, orderly and safe city means higher rents and building values. Give the media success stories like that to cover, instead of distractions, and they surely will.

Grade: A

Overall

From a real estate perspective, Adams’ performance as mayor has been a mixed bag. Pretty good on policy and values, less so on execution. If he can learn from his mistakes, and admit some of them, the rest of his tenure looks promising. If he delves further into disgruntlement, that’s what the narrative will be.

Grade: B

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