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........

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