The Record
Fifteen promises whose verdicts are already in, scored with the same rules as the live measures, across five administrations. One difference, stated plainly: these metrics could not be registered before the results existed, so each is defined from the promise's own text before the score is computed, and the definition is on the page.
Adams, 2022 to 2025 2 met | 1 missed
Adams
24 in 24 met
Advance 24 affordable housing projects on public sites in 2024, creating or preserving over 12,000 apartments - State of the City, January 2024.
Announced at a 1.4 percent rental vacancy rate [6sqft].
The administration reported advancing 26 projects across all five boroughs in 2024, over 13,000 units [Harlem World]. One caveat scored into the verdict: “advanced” is an administration-defined milestone, anything from an RFP to a financing closing, and the count is self-reported.
Data: HPD affordable housing production, NYC Open Data.
Adams
Curbside composting met
Free weekly curbside compost collection in all five boroughs by the end of 2024, on a published borough-by-borough schedule - State of the City, January 2023.
Roadmap: Brooklyn October 2023, Staten Island and the Bronx March 2024, Manhattan October 2024 [Waste Today].
The rollout landed borough by borough on the published schedule; Manhattan service began October 6, 2024, completing the citywide map [Waste Dive]. Access was delivered on time; participation is the question the tonnage data will answer for years.
Data: DSNY monthly tonnage, NYC Open Data.
Adams
Streets Plan benchmarks missed
Fifty miles of protected bus lanes and eighty miles of protected bike lanes by the end of 2023 - Local Law 195 of 2019, a statutory mandate this administration inherited and owned delivery of.
The benchmarks, set in law [Streetsblog].
Through the 2023 statutory deadline the city had installed 9.6 of 50 required protected bus lane miles and 58.2 of 80 protected bike lane miles [Streetsblog]. By March 2026 the transportation department said its next plan would focus “squarely on outcomes, not just miles” [City & State]. Scored as an inherited legal mandate falling due on this administration's watch, not a campaign promise.
Data: DOT annual Streets Plan updates; the bike network in NYC Open Data.
de Blasio, 2014 to 2021 2 met | 1 missed | 1 partially
de Blasio
Vision Zero: ten years after the promise of zero, 268 missed
In January 2014, weeks into his first term, Mayor de Blasio's Vision Zero Action Plan set the city's goal: eliminate traffic deaths on New York City streets by 2024. The metric follows the promise's text: people killed in traffic crashes, all modes, per year.
Chart: people killed in motor vehicle crashes per year. Source: NYPD Motor Vehicle Collisions, NYC Open Data, through 2025. DOT's official annual counts differ from the open-data file by a few deaths in some years; this page uses the public file consistently.
What moved the line
The promise was imported: Sweden's parliament adopted the original Vision Zero in 1997 and has more than halved its road deaths since, but nearly three decades in, even the originator has not reached zero [source]. New York's version leaned on two tools: state approval in 2014 to cut the default speed limit from 30 to 25 mph, and speed cameras, expanded to 140 school zones that June [DOT]. The cameras worked where they stood - daily violations at camera locations fell 94 percent over ten years - and the program's fragility showed in 2018, the year of the low, when Albany let the camera authorization lapse and an emergency executive order had to switch the 140 zones back on before the school year [amNY]. The state has since authorized 750 school zones, running around the clock.
The reversal has a clear signature: empty pandemic streets invited speed. Before the March 2020 lockdown each city speed camera recorded an average of 23 violations a day; in the first weeks of lockdown it was 33, up 43 percent, with Manhattan cameras up 149 percent [NBC]. Albany's own remedy confirms the diagnosis: overnight and weekend camera enforcement, authorized in 2022 explicitly in response to pandemic speeding [DOT].
Verdict: missed. Deaths fell 22 percent to a 2018 low, climbed back to the 2013 level by 2021, and stood at 268 in the promise year - 29 fewer than the year before the plan. The record cuts both ways: 2025, one year past the deadline, was the lowest full year ever recorded at 229. The promise was missed; the direction, a decade on, is finally the right one.
de Blasio
Pre-K for All met
Free, full-day pre-K for 53,604 four-year-olds in September 2014, scaling to the 73,250 who need it by the 2015-16 school year - the Ready to Launch plan, January 2014.
The implementation plan, seat tables included [Ready to Launch, PDF].
From a 19,483-seat baseline, the city stood up roughly 34,000 new full-day seats in one summer and counted 53,230 children in seats that November - Year 1, met [transcript]. Year 2 reached 68,547 of the 73,250 estimated need - about 94 percent, and nearly 50,000 above where the city started [City Hall]. The 73,250 was the plan's estimate of family need, not an enrollment floor.
Data: DOE demographic snapshot, NYC Open Data; NYSED pre-K data.
de Blasio
Housing New York met, early
Build and preserve 200,000 affordable homes over ten years - the Housing New York plan, May 2014.
The five-borough, ten-year plan [plan PDF].
The city announced the 200,000th financed home in December 2021, two years ahead of the 2024 deadline, with 46 percent of units serving households earning under $42,000 [HPD]. The claim survives an independent recount: the public unit-level dataset sums to 205,839 units for the plan's years [NYC Open Data]. One caveat: “financed” counts preservation deals and loan closings, not new keys in doors.
Data: Housing New York units by building, NYC Open Data.
de Blasio
NYC Ferry partially
An estimated 4.6 million trips a year across six routes - NYCEDC, 2016. Revised upward in 2018: as many as 9 million annual passengers by 2023.
The original projection [NYCEDC, 2016] and the revision [NYCEDC, 2018].
Chart: annual boardings. Source: NYC Ferry ridership, NYC Open Data, hourly boardings summed by year; 2017 omitted (partial year - service launched May 1). Boardings is the dataset's unit; passenger counts run slightly lower.
The first projection was met with room to spare: 6.36 million boardings in 2019, the first full year with all six routes running. The revised promise was missed: 6.88 million in 2023 against the 9 million forecast, after the pandemic cut ridership in half in 2020. The system has settled around 7.4 million - well above the plan it launched with, well short of the one it grew into.
Bloomberg, 2002 to 2013 2 met | 1 partially
Bloomberg
No. 6 oil: the phaseout the city finished met
No. 6 was the dirtiest fuel burned in New York: the heavy, tar-like residue left over from oil refining, so thick it had to be heated just to flow, and the biggest single source of building soot. Thousands of apartment buildings burned it because it was cheap. A 2011 rule under the Clean Heat program ordered it out of every boiler by mid-2015. The metric follows the rule's text: boilers holding a city permit listing No. 6 as primary or secondary fuel.
Chart: permits active at mid-year, from issue and expiration dates. Source: DEP Clean Air Tracking System permits, NYC Open Data. Early years may undercount: the database's older records are sparser. Permits, not smoke: a permit is what the rule regulates.
How it got done
The phaseout started with someone looking out a window: around 2009 an Environmental Defense Fund staffer noticed black smoke pouring from a Manhattan chimney and asked what it was. The answer became a report with a finding lopsided enough to make regulation easy to argue - 87 percent of the city's heating-oil soot came from the dirtiest grades, burned in about one percent of buildings, roughly 9,000 structures putting out a thousand tons of soot a year, in a city that burned two of every three gallons of this sludge used for heating in the entire United States [EDF]. By that accounting, one percent of buildings sent more particulate matter into the air than all of the city's cars and trucks combined [Scientific American].
The city did not just mandate; it financed. In 2012 the Bloomberg administration announced more than $100 million for Clean Heat conversions - a $5 million city loan-loss reserve unlocking $90 million in private lending, plus $18 million from housing agencies, while the utilities upgraded gas mains to lower the cost of switching [NYREJ]. Nearly 6,000 conversions followed, 99.8 percent compliant by the mid-2015 deadline [Cooperator]. When the city announced in 2016 that all 5,300 buildings registered as burning No. 6 in 2011 had converted, soot pollution had fallen by more than half, with an estimated 210 premature deaths and 540 hospitalizations avoided every year [EDF].
Verdict: met. From 1,088 permitted boilers in 2010 to two by 2015 and zero since. The city has done a dirty-oil phaseout before, which is exactly why the No. 4 countdown - 561 boilers, due July 2027 - is measurable with a straight face: the benchmark is the city's own record. The remaining No. 4 buildings are not evenly spread - most sit in northern Manhattan and the Bronx, in neighborhoods with disproportionate asthma rates, which is part of why the Council pulled the deadline forward [Gothamist].
Bloomberg
MillionTreesNYC met, early
Plant one million new trees across the five boroughs within a decade - PlaNYC, October 2007.
Launched with the Parks Department and the New York Restoration Project [NYC Parks].
The millionth tree - number 1,017,634, an American linden - went into the ground at Joyce Kilmer Park in the Bronx on November 20, 2015, two years ahead of the 2017 deadline, planted by the mayor who made the promise and the mayor who finished it [NYC Parks]. Nearly 50,000 volunteers planted alongside the agencies.
Data: NYC Parks planting records; the street tree censuses of 2005 and 2015.
Bloomberg
New Housing Marketplace partially
Create or preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing by 2014 - the New Housing Marketplace plan, expanded 2006.
The plan [plan PDF].
The administration left office at about 160,000 units created or preserved against the 165,000 target - roughly 97 percent - with the pipeline finishing under the successor plan [City Limits] [the mayor's own record site]. The Bronx got the most new construction; Manhattan the most preservation.
Data: HPD reporting; successor-plan units in NYC Open Data.
Giuliani, 1994 to 2001 1 met | 1 partially
Giuliani
Closing Fresh Kills met, early
Close the Fresh Kills landfill - then taking roughly 13,000 tons of household waste a day - by December 31, 2001. Set with the state in 1996.
The commitment, restated in the 1998 export plan [City Hall, 1998].
The last barge of household waste arrived March 22, 2001, nine months early, ending a half-century of landfilling on Staten Island [Baruch CUNY]. Disclosed plainly: the site reopened months later to receive World Trade Center debris after September 11 - a different use, not part of the household-waste promise. The export system that replaced the landfill is a cost the city still carries.
Data: DSNY monthly tonnage, NYC Open Data, 1990 to present.
Giuliani
Welfare to work by 2000 partially
End welfare dependency by the year 2000 and replace it with work in exchange for earnings - set July 1998.
The goal, and the city's own declaration of reaching it [City Hall, 1999].
The city declared “full engagement” on December 28, 1999: a caseload of 276,000, down from a 1995 peak of 562,000, with 131,542 recipients in work activities and the unengaged count at zero [City Hall]. The Urban Institute's assessment is the caveat the verdict carries: full engagement “is a milestone of administration, not participation” - every case accounted for, not every recipient working [Urban Institute]. By the city's own numbers, under half the caseload was in work activities when the goal was declared met; welfare itself continued at about 200,000 cases into 2001.
Data: the 1999 City Hall release and the Urban Institute study carry the series; no continuous open-data series reaches the 1990s.
Dinkins, 1990 to 1993 2 met | 1 missed
Dinkins
The New York/New York Agreement missed
Build 3,314 supportive housing units for homeless mentally ill adults by June 30, 1992 - the first city-state agreement of its kind, signed August 22, 1990.
The agreement and its planned-vs-actual accounting [Independent Budget Office].
The deadline was missed by six years: the city finished its units in May 1997 and the state in October 1998, delivering 3,112 of the 3,314 planned new units plus 503 rent-subsidy units added by amendment [IBO] [Furman Center]. The promise's substance outlived its schedule: 4,679 homeless people with psychiatric disabilities were housed through the agreements, the single-adult shelter census fell by more than a third in five years, and the model became the template for every supportive-housing pact since [Supportive Housing Network].
Data: the IBO planned-vs-actual table (city 1,423 of 1,426; state 1,689 of 1,888).
Dinkins
Safe Streets, Safe City met
A dedicated $1.8 billion tax package to expand the police force by 3,500 officers over six years - announced October 1990, enacted by Albany February 1991.
Contemporary reporting on the enacted program [Christian Science Monitor, 1991].
The hiring the program financed arrived mostly after its author left: uniformed staffing grew by about 6,000 officers in the 1990s “primarily as a result of the Safe Streets, Safe City initiative,” reaching an all-time high near 40,000 by 1998 [IBO, 1998]. Two honesty notes: the raw headcount is inflated by the 1995 merger of the transit and housing police into the NYPD, and the successor administration “took advantage of Safe Streets, Safe City funds that had been deferred” [FactCheck.org] [Gotham Center].
Data: Vital City's NYPD staffing series, 1990 to 2024, downloadable.
Dinkins
Beacon schools met
Five million dollars to open school-based community centers in ten schools across the five boroughs, in the program's first year - part of Safe Streets, Safe City's cops-and-kids strategy, 1991.
The first-year commitment [Education Week, 1995].
The ten Beacons opened, and the model scaled: 37 schools by 1995, 80 by 2001, and 92 today, serving roughly 200,000 children and families a year, with the 1994 federal crime bill copying the model nationally [Education Week] [AED/Chapin Hall evaluation, PDF] [DYCD]. One flag: per-site funding eroded from $450,000 to $345,000 over two decades [CSS].
Data: site counts from the cited documents (10, 37, 40, 80, 92); no single official series exists.
Why keep a record: the live measures track the current administration because it is the one making promises now. Scoring past administrations' promises with the same rules - met, missed, and the partly-true declarations in between - is what keeps the method honest, whoever is in City Hall.