For nearly four years, the Adams administration has worked every day to make New York City a safer, more affordable city for all, especially working-class families. We have made great progress on public safety, public health, and economic growth, and we continue to be the most pro-housing administration in modern city history. We are proud of our track record, and we know that the work we have done will keep our city’s fundamentals strong in the years to come.
Nowhere is this more obvious than public safety, where we have hired nearly 10,000 new police officers and driven crime down to historic lows. Shootings are down by 54 percent and murders are down by 36 percent compared to the same period before the start of our administration. Thanks to our work — including removing over 24,000 illegal guns — shooting incidents and shooting victims are both at their lowest levels in our city’s recorded history.
In addition to fighting violent crime, we have protected our neighborhoods and our quality of life by shutting down 1,500 illegal cannabis stores and seizing over $100 million in illegal cannabis products. We have made our streets safer by confiscating more than 120,000 illegal e-bikes and mopeds, as well as implementing a 15-mph speed limit that will protect both pedestrians and riders. We have also made our streets cleaner, launching a “War on Trash” that has been an unqualified success. New rules requiring 70 percent of city trash to be moved into containers have been transformative, resulting in cleaner streets and fewer rats.
Protecting public safety means protecting public health, and we are proud that we have effectively done both, especially when it comes to helping those suffering from serious mental illness. Our “Subway Safety Plan” has moved 8,800 New Yorkers off our subways and streets and into shelters. We created a new PATH initiative to partner nurses and police officers and made over 20,000 engagements with unhoused New Yorkers living in the subway system in the first year alone. Most importantly, we changed the conversation on serious mental illness, emphasizing care and commitment instead of letting those in crisis suffer on our streets.
The economy reached new heights on our watch, shattering the record for the most jobs in city history 12 times in a row. We also broke the record for the most small businesses in city history, with 183,000 small businesses, and cut unemployment by 39 percent since start of our administration. At this moment, we are celebrating 4.9 million jobs in the city, another record-setting number.
New Yorkers work hard, and this administration is determined to put money back in their pockets. We passed our “Axe the Tax for the Working Class” plan to eliminate and cut city personal income taxes for working families, resulting in $63 million in savings. We also partnered with Undue Medical Debt to forgive $2 billion in medical debt for half a million New Yorkers and provided free internet and basic cable TV access to 330,000 New Yorkers in NYCHA through “Big Apple Connect.” These efforts and more have helped us put a total of more than $30 billion back into the pockets of working-class New Yorkers.
We’ve known from day one that being pro-affordability meant needing to be pro-housing. That is why we mobilized to pass our “City of Yes” agenda, the first citywide rezoning initiative in six decades, to create up to 80,000 new homes and invest $5 billion in housing and infrastructure. We advanced five neighborhood plans to create more than 50,000 homes over the next 15 years, and we created, preserved, or planned 433,250 homes since the start of the administration — and we’re not done yet. Thanks to our work, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers will have the key to affordable and abundant housing in the years to come.
We have also supported a major expansion of public space, creating over 74 football fields of new parks, greenways, and recreational spaces since the start of our administration.
Because of so much of what we accomplished, New York is a great city to raise a family in, and our world-class public schools support a diverse population of students and families from all over the world. We are committed to excellence, and by implementing new evidence-based reading and math instruction to half a million students, we were able to improve student test scores across the board. We are also supporting working families with the launch of our free “Afterschool for All” program thanks to a total investment of $755 million, and we cut the average co-payment for subsidized childcare from $55 per week in 2022 to less than $5 per week today — that’s an average savings of nearly $1,300 per child each year!
We are proud of all we have accomplished, from the daily work of keeping our city running to sheltering and serving more than 239,500 migrants from 160 countries when they had nowhere else to turn. New Yorkers always stand up for each other and for our way of life, and our city workers will always do the same. As the Mamdani administration prepares to take office, we are committed to a smooth and successful transition, as we work with the future mayor to keep New York the safest big city in America, to expand economic opportunity for all, and to improve quality of life across the five boroughs.
