Eric Adams’s Big Apple Appealed to Commercial Real Estate

New York Mayor Eric Adams will be leaving office in January with a string of memorable anecdotes, late-night club visits, an unusually hefty bag of achievements on the housing front, and the giant black mark of a corruption scandal that never saw its day in court in his municipal wake. 

Even if the federal government did drop the charges against him, Adams will probably never be fully exonerated in the public eye, and his polling numbers up until the day he dropped his campaign for re-election were illustrative of that (read: they were terrible). 

But, his underlying legacy is likely to go down in history not as a mayor who was nearly removed from office by the governor and faced years in prison if convicted, but one who transformed the city’s zoning maps and laid the groundwork to change the nature of urban planning in New York City.

To paraphrase Mitch Korbey, chair of Herrick, Feinstein’s land use and zoning group, Adams achieved more in four years than any mayor since the 1960s. That includes Bill de Blasio, who had eight years to execute multiple neighborhood plans — which, frankly, haven’t lived up to the hype. (It also includes, it should be noted, the three terms each of Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg, the latter normally cited as the most real estate-friendly mayor in recent New York history.) 

Take for example, the Gowanus rezoning, which de Blasio passed in the last year of his administration. Korbey said he believes it would not have been nearly as successful without many of the developers in the neighborhood racing against the clock to reap the benefits of the expiring 421a property tax abatement, a state program. Korbey hands most of the credit to then-Councilmember Brad Lander, who is now the city’s comptroller.

“Gowanus saw a tremendous amount of development because of location, but also because the projects vested under 421a had to be built within a couple of years to maintain their vesting,” Korbey said. “So, if you will, there was a bit of an artificial stimulus as a result of the need to invest under 421a and then a need to build quickly. So we saw project after project. It’s also fair to say that that neighborhood was extremely ripe for the rezoning.”

Or the SoHo rezoning, stymied mostly by the fact that much of the area was development-restricted anyway thanks to a historic district and only a small number of possible development sites. The neighborhood plan — also passed in de Blasio’s final months — was a heavy, controversial lift that has reaped few rewards four years later.

Much of Adams’s efforts to see a major influx of development also came near the end of his term in office, but was the product of persistence throughout his four years in Gracie Mansion.

Even in the thicket of his legal battle with the federal government in late 2024, Adams was able to negotiate the passage of the City of Yes with the New York City Council. The biggest revamp of the city’s zoning code since the early 1960s could lead to the creation of about 80,000 units of new housing and drastically alter the commercial streetscape in areas such as the Garment District and along Third Avenue (think office conversions).

The next major step was the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan, which the City Council adopted in May. It could produce 4,600 apartments in an approximately 21-block area of central Brooklyn by way of allowing taller, denser residential buildings in what’s now primarily a manufacturing zone.

In August, after he was unburdened from the indictments themselves, Mayor Adams secured approval from the City Council for the Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan, which could greenlight the creation of nearly 10,000 new housing units from office-to-residential conversions. Speaking of those, the Adams administration crafted rules this year for developers to make use of the 467m state tax incentive for conversions.

Adams has also made good on promises to use city-owned land for housing projects, advancing the redevelopment of the long-derelict Flushing Airport site in Queens in July, for instance. And he’s targeted largely unused or underused sites such as a Bronx stretch along the Harlem River, where in August Adams announced a 927-unit affordable housing project.

Some items that remain outstanding for now include the Jamaica Neighborhood Plan, which passed key committees earlier in October and could clear a path for 12,000 units in southeast Queens if passed by the City Council later this year. There is also a Long Island City rezoning called OneLIC still working its way through the City Council. It stands to create 14,700 new homes. 

Adams also worked to streamline the approval processes for new affordable housing developments. Those efforts included supporting certain ballot measures this election. Those measures all appear to have passed on Tuesday.  

In terms of getting a casino — or three — in New York City, Adams’s appointees to Community Advisory Committees for each of the original eight proposals voted “yes” on advancing all the applicants to the final round of approvals before the New York State Gaming Board. Adams even went so far as to veto the City Council’s resolution to oppose the zoning changes for Bally’s plan in the Bronx, essentially raising it from the dead. It is now one of only three proposals remaining.

Finally, another thing Adams did right as far as commercial real estate was concerned was with a few key appointments. Jessica Tisch, as commissioner of the New York Police Department, has been credited with boosting the public safety that CRE leaders say is so essential to their field. For instance, the NYPD announced this month that the city recorded its fewest shooting incidents and shooting victims ever during the first 10 months of 2025. The department also touted record-low transit crime in October. 

City Planning Commission Chair Dan Garodnick, who shepherded many of the zoning changes and other housing policy through approval processes, and First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, who left in March ahead of this month’s election, also win plaudits.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, in fact, is keeping Tisch in her present role. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.