Residents of one of Brooklyn’s most resilient communities are weighing the benefits of reinvestment against the displacement risk facing low-income renters who held the neighborhood together through decades of disinvestment
The Price of Progress in East New York
East New York has survived things that would have erased other neighborhoods. The white flight of the 1960s. The arson fires and disinvestment of the 1970s. The crack epidemic. The defunding of public institutions across a generation. What emerged from all of that was a community built largely by its own people — through the sweat equity of homeowners like Travis Williams, who bought his Snediker Avenue home for $150,000 in 1996 when no one else wanted it, through programs like the Nehemiah housing initiative that transformed vacant lots into family homes, through churches, block associations, and mutual aid networks that held the social fabric together when the market and the government had both walked away. Now, with crime down, schools improved, streets repaved, and transit connections drawing renewed attention from real estate speculators, East New York faces a different kind of threat: the possibility that the people who stabilized it will be priced out of the neighborhood they rebuilt.
The Numbers Behind the Fear
The anxiety is not abstract. City Limits reported that rents in East New York’s northern tier, once among the lowest in Brooklyn, have climbed steadily as the neighborhood’s proximity to Manhattan via the A, C, J, and Z lines becomes more widely recognized. A one-bedroom unit that rented for around $800 a month in 2009 was approaching $1,300 as market pressure intensified. In a neighborhood where median household income hovers around $30,000 and close to 40 percent of children live in poverty, a rent increase of that magnitude is not an inconvenience. It is the difference between staying and going. The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy has documented that rent burden for low-income renters in East New York already approaches 40 percent of household income — well above the 30 percent threshold that housing economists use to define cost-burdened households. The Furman Center at NYU publishes annual neighborhood-level data on rent burden, displacement risk, and housing market trends across all five boroughs, and its East New York profiles offer the most granular public data available on the forces reshaping the community.
Who Benefits From Rezoning?
At the center of the policy debate is a federally funded rezoning initiative that has targeted the northern tier of East New York for higher-density, mixed-income development oriented around transit corridors. Proponents argue that new construction will create affordable units through inclusionary requirements, generate local jobs, and modernize infrastructure that has been neglected for decades. The plan envisions taller buildings along Atlantic Avenue, new retail, and eventually a connection to the regional transit network that would make East New York more economically integrated with the rest of the metropolitan area. Critics are more cautious. Community board members and longtime residents have noted that inclusionary housing at 20 percent affordable units still means 80 percent market rate — and that market-rate development in a transit-accessible Brooklyn neighborhood tends to attract residents with significantly higher incomes than current community members. The historical record of rezoning in New York City, from the South Bronx to Williamsburg to Long Island City, is not uniformly encouraging for low-income incumbents. The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development has published extensive research on the displacement effects of rezonings in New York City neighborhoods and provides tools for community members to evaluate proposed land-use changes.
The Displacement Data Gap
One of the most frustrating aspects of the gentrification debate in East New York and elsewhere is the scarcity of hard data on actual displacement. Urban planning scholars Kathe Newman and Elvin Wyly have documented that displaced renters effectively disappear from housing surveys once they leave a neighborhood — there is no systematic tracking of where they go, what they pay, or what consequences follow. The Department of Homeless Services has noted that Community Board 5, which covers much of East New York, has historically been a high-volume entry point into the shelter system, with eviction cited as the leading cause. But the causal link between rising rents, landlord pressure, and shelter entry is difficult to prove rigorously precisely because the data systems that would capture it do not exist in a form that makes the connection transparent. What does exist is anecdotal evidence, consistent in its direction if not its scale: residents describing neighbors who disappeared after rent increases, single mothers who ended up in shelter, families squeezed out of apartments they had occupied for a decade or more.
What Policy Can and Cannot Do
Housing advocates argue that the tools to protect East New York’s existing residents are known and available — they simply require political will and adequate funding. Rent stabilization protections must be strengthened and enforced for the hundreds of buildings in the neighborhood that carry regulatory agreements. Subsidy programs deep enough to serve households earning below 30 percent of Area Median Income must be expanded, since most affordable housing programs are calibrated to households that are poor by the city’s standards but not poor enough to qualify for the deepest subsidies. Anti-harassment tenant protections must be enforced against landlords who use neglect, buyout pressure, and legal intimidation to drive out long-term residents in anticipation of rent increases. And community land trusts — which permanently remove properties from the speculative market by placing them in nonprofit ownership — must be adequately capitalized to acquire properties before the market does. The NYC Community Land Initiative supports community land trust development across the five boroughs and has worked in Central Brooklyn neighborhoods facing exactly the displacement pressures documented in East New York. The question, as Adrienne Terry of Brooklyn Community Services put it plainly, is whether a “subsidy program that can compete with market-rate housing” will be created before the community it is meant to protect has already been scattered. That program does not yet exist at the scale required. Under Mayor Mamdani, who made affordable housing the centerpiece of his campaign and his first White House meeting, the pressure to build something real before the displacement window closes is higher than it has been in years.
