While local efforts to decarbonize will mainly benefit the world as a whole, local efforts to adapt to climate change will benefit mainly people in cities, who will be more resilient to the extreme heat, drought, flooding and fires that planetary warming is exacerbating. Reflecting the benefits to cities of adapting, cities began planning adaptation early in the twenty-first century. However, as of the early 2020s, US cities had undertaken little adaptation (as opposed to adaptation planning). From 2000 until 2012, when Superstorm Sandy struck the city, New York policymakers focused on gathering information about the risks that climate change presents for the city, but they undertook few tangible actions to protect the city against risks such as storm surge flooding. Sandy increased policymakers’ perception of the urgency of acting to adapt, and injected $15 billion of federal funding into the city that enabled it to invest in adaptation. Yet, between 2012 and the early 2020s, the city had great difficulty implementing adaptation actions. New York City’s top-down approach to climate change adaptation underscores the difficulties that cities face implementing the costly local public good of climate change adaptation without additional assistance from higher levels of government.