As Eric Adams ran for mayor of New York City, questions arose about inconsistencies centered on a Brooklyn apartment that he seemed to own, even though he said he had transferred it to his former girlfriend.

The explanation was simple, Mr. Adams explained. His ex-girlfriend failed to file the proper paperwork cementing the deal.

After Mr. Adams was elected, it emerged that he still owned half of that apartment. He then blamed his accountant for the mistake, suggesting that the accountant may have been distracted because he had recently become homeless. The mayor said the transfer to his former partner was “underway.”

But on Wednesday, it became clear that Mr. Adams still owns that one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, according to financial disclosures released by the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board.

A spokesman for the mayor said that the process that was underway last June is still underway.

“After previously learning that the transfer did not go through, the mayor initiated the process last year to transfer the property, but for tax-related purposes, it is currently being delayed, and the mayor has filled out his COIB paperwork to reflect that fact,” the spokesman, Fabien Levy, said.

Mr. Adams’s ever-developing story about the modest Brooklyn apartment underscores his tendency to sometimes tell stories that develop holes under scrutiny.

Mr. Adams last year told state legislators he had been convicted of a crime, when he had not been. In a 2019 commencement speech, he took a pastor’s story about a dog dirtying his yard and made it his own. In recent weeks, Mr. Adams has inaccurately suggested that migrants were occupying nearly half of the city’s hotel rooms and that fentanyl was a commonplace ingredient in cannabis edibles.

And now, contrary to his years of saying otherwise, documents show Mr. Adams continues to own the apartment he bought in 1988 with his then-partner, Sylvia Cowan, who could not be reached for comment Wednesday morning.

In March, a neighbor spotted a tax form from Emblem Health addressed to Eric Adams in the communal mail area of the Crown Heights building. Also in March, the neighbor spotted mail to the mayor from American Express, on which someone had appended a note reading, “LOL.” The neighbor noted another piece of mail on Tuesday night.

The Crown Heights apartment is in addition to the multifamily rental property he owns in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the condominium he co-owns in Fort Lee, N.J., with Tracey Collins, whom he has described as his partner. Ms. Cowan, his former partner, also purchased an apartment in that Fort Lee building, just downstairs from Mr. Adams’s.

During Mr. Adams’s campaign for mayor in 2021, his co-ownership of the one-bedroom Crown Heights apartment became an issue, because he had left it off disclosure forms that the state and city require from elected officials.

At the time, Mr. Adams said he was correct to omit the ownership stake, because he had transferred that stake to Ms. Cowan in 2007. To prove his point, he produced a three-sentence letter saying as much, though the letter was not notarized and was not signed by Ms. Cowan.

He blamed Ms. Cowan for failing to properly record the transfer.

When it emerged last year that Mr. Adams still owned the apartment, he blamed his former accountant for the misunderstanding.

“However, once he got a new accountant, the mayor realized all the proper paperwork had not been filled out in the past and that a new deed had not been filed by the other property owner,” Mr. Levy said last year. “That process is now underway.”

Dana Rubinstein is a reporter on the Metro desk covering New York City politics. Before joining The Times in 2020, she spent nine years at the publication now known as Politico New York. @danarubinstein

Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter on the Metro desk and co-author of the book “The Fixers.” He was part of a team at The Wall Street Journal that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for stories about hush money deals made on behalf of Donald Trump and a federal investigation of the president’s personal lawyer. @mrothfeld

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