NYC NOW - What Greenpoint’s Transformation Reveals About NYC’s Housing Crisis

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Twenty years after a Bloomberg era rezoning transformed Greenpoint’s waterfront, the neighborhood stands as a case study in both growth and displacement. As housing costs dominate the mayoral race, WNYC’s David Brand reports on how the lessons from Greenpoint’s boom are shaping the city’s next big housing debate.

Hey, David. Janay. How much do you pay your rent? Don't answer that question. That's super personal, man. Yeah, that's kind of a taboo, right? Yeah, yeah. But as a housing reporter, I'm sure, you ask it all the time, right?

Yeah, that's kind of the main question I ask people, and it brings up a lot of feelings. So I live in this place. So the other day, I was talking to this woman in Greenpoint. Could you say your name? My name is Olivia Kozlowski. She's Polish. Her parents came here from Poland. How long have you lived here?

I've lived here my whole entire life, so 38 years. And what's your rent? $2,600. $2,600 in Greenpoint? Yeah, that's a great deal in Greenpoint, but she's kind of living in fear of sudden rent increase. Well, I mean, I think I've been fortunate where my landlord is Polish, and I'm Polish.

But my landlord will ask me quite often how long I plan to stay in the apartment, and he'll kind of hint at the cost of my apartment versus the apartments in relating, or adjacent houses, which kind of at first was quite jarring to have someone ask you how long you're going to stay in your quote unquote home. And I think I've, especially the last year and seeing a lot of friends being pushed out of the neighborhood, you feel like your home is being taken away from you. But me and the friends that are still in the neighborhood and have lived here their whole lives,

still have that underlying hope that perhaps will be the lucky ones. A lot of New Yorkers fail this way. How long before my landlord raises the rent? How long can I afford to stay? Housing costs have dominated this year's mayoral election. The Democratic nominee, Zeramam Dani, has talked about freezing rent-for-rent-stabilized apartments, building more deeply affordable housing, and curbing rising costs.

The number one reason that New Yorkers are becoming residents of Jersey City, of Pennsylvania, of Connecticut, because they cannot afford this city. nominee Curtis Slewa says he wants to cut property taxes and regulations to drive down costs. And Andrew Cuomo is touting plans to streamline construction to build more affordable housing. It has to be the mayor's number one job. From WMYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jene Pierre. This week, as part of our ongoing mayoral election series on the issues at stake in New York City,

we're diving into housing. WMYC's David Brand goes to Greenpoint Brooklyn, a neighborhood where gentrification has been on hyperdrive. The area was rezoned 20 years ago this year, ushering in a new skyline of tall luxury apartment buildings where there were once factories and warehouses. Some residents like Olivia say it's transformed the neighborhood for the worst. I don't think that with those high rises it would have changed as much as it has. housing experts say it's complicated. So what lessons are there for the next mayor? And how can the city streamline development

while also protecting existing residents from getting priced out? Thank you. I want to take you back to January 2003. Okay. Mike Bloomberg's mayor. He's a billionaire, and he was elected just after the attacks on 9-11.

I think New York has expected me to run the city government much the same way as, I ran my company. I am doing exactly that. That year in 2003 at his state of the city address, he's still relatively new to office, so he has a lot of big plans. And that's when he brings up

two specific neighborhoods in Brooklyn. What are they? Williamsburg and Greenpoint. We'll release a plan for new open spaces and thousands of new waterfront housing units along the East River in Greenpoint, Williamsburg. He has this plan to totally overhaul the shoreline of northern Brooklyn, those two neighborhoods, right along the waterfront.

He wants to add new high-rise development along the shoreline. Just as we're rezoning areas across the city to make more land available to drive the cost of housing down. So all of this is way before I moved to New York City. What was that waterfront in Greenpoint and Williamsburg like at that time? Yeah, it was before I moved there too. I moved to the area back in 2011. And even then, it was kind of like a lot of warehouses. It was very industrial.

There was not much in the way of public access to the water. But pretty quickly, the people who lived in these neighborhoods started to get really concerned, and they started to organize. There was this rally that we have this archival tape from, because we were covering it at the time, and people were speaking out about their concerns for displacement, about supercharging gentrification in this neighborhood that was already undergoing these changes, and they wanted to transform. into this luxury community. One of those people was Brad Lander. I'm Brad Lander from the Pratt Center,

and on behalf of the Campaign for Inclusionary Zoning, I salute the residents of Greenpoint-Weemsburg, who are here today in such- Comptroller, Bradlanger? Yeah, we know him as the city controller as a candidate for mayor, who finished third in the Democratic primary. But back in 2005, he was running

this lesser-known organization called the Pratt Center. And they were working with community groups advocating for more affordability requirements in the new buildings and stronger tenant protections. Yes, we need new housing, but only if the people in New York City can afford to live there. The people are the neighborhoods that we're talking about. And so just as communities of Greenpoint-Wilingsburg are calling for a guarantee that 40% of new housing be affordable to low, moderate income community residents in Greenpoint-Wilensburg,

a neighborhood where more than half the families make less than $30,000 a year. What did community leaders get in the end? Well, they achieve some things here in their negotiations. When all was said and done, the Bloomberg administration pledged investments in new parks, upgrades to existing ones like McCarran Park, making this waterfront esplanade that would give everyone access to the waterfront so you didn't have to go around chain link fence and scramble over rocks in the East River to get close to the water. That's no fun. Yeah. And they created a program to reward developers who made a portion of new apartments affordable. so for low and middle income renters.

At the time, it was the first large-scale test of a program like this. But it was voluntary. Developers didn't have to participate. How quickly did the neighborhood change after the rezoning was passed? So the change wasn't immediate. You know, Towers started to appear in Williamsburg first, but over the past decade, really, we've seen that transformation in the Greenpoint Waterfront. And if you had not visited the neighborhood since like 2014, 2015, and you came back today,

you probably wouldn't even recognize it. that different. We used to be looking at tall buildings in the city, and now we're looking at tall buildings like in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. I talked to Marissa Ponich about these changes. She's lived in the neighborhood for 19 years. When we first moved in our roof, we could see the Chrysler building, the Empire State Building, and on the other side, there wasn't one single tall condo tower yet, so we could see the entire Williamsburg Bridge. And now, if you stand in just the right place. You can see like a sliver of the Empire State Building. All right. So here's my question, David. These towers go up. Tens of thousands of people move in.

Why is the G train that serves that neighborhood still this short little rinky dink train? In fact, I like to say that the G train stands for, God damn, this is a small train. You know, you're standing there. You're on the phone waiting for the train to come and it pulls into the station. and you look up and suddenly you have to sprint 50 yards to get into that last car. The transportation just really hasn't kept up with the neighborhood growth in Greenpoint, that's for sure. And that gets to some of the promises from the rezoning that haven't been fulfilled yet. There was a commitment to create new parks to build a brand new school. And, you know, some of that is done, but it hasn't been completed 20 years later.

People are still waiting for things like a park on Box Street and the completion of Bush. Shwick Inlet Park. And that new school, the plan only got greenlit like a few months ago. So we heard Bloomberg say that he wanted to do this rezoning, you know, so the city could build more housing and bring rents down, right? Has that actually happened? Well, let's look back 10 years ago. The median asking rent in Greenpoint in October 2015 was close to $2,900. Eish.

That was 10 years ago. Yeah, that was expensive. I was looking at Street Easy for some of this historic data. The rents dropped during the pandemic. You know, we saw a big dip in the housing market, and so rents were actually going lower for a bit. But a year later, December 2021, median rents surged back to $3,500. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it got crazier.

I saw that there were 350 apartments listed in Greenpoint on October 13th. The median rent was nearly $4,700. Oh, my goodness. I honestly understand why Olivia whispered her rent to us. Yeah. I mean, in that context, she's getting a pretty good deal. A damn good deal. And she says it's not just her feeling this pressure.

Her parents have been living in the same apartment for almost 40 years. It's the apartment she grew up in. They've been lucky for now. I think they do have that fear that you just never know what might happen in the next three months and the next six months. If the landlord decides to raise their rent to what the market rate is now. So their fallback, if that happens, would be going back to Poland. Really? She says she just wishes there was a way for a neighborhood like hers to grow and improve and have all these new investments while also protecting the existing residents from these out-of-control price hikes like they've been seeing.

And Greenpoint offers kind of a lesson, like a cautionary tale for the next mayor of what happens when you don't strike that balance. Coming up, what can we learn from the changes in Greenpoint? One of the bigger regrets that I have is not being more. aggressive and trying to push for some common sense logical changes to the rent laws. And does anyone like what's happened in Greenpoint over the past two decades? I think it's great because it's better for the neighborhood. You know, it brings the neighborhood out better. So housing affordability has been a key issue in this mayoral race.

Big whoop, right? Because New York City's rent has always been expensive. Yeah, high rents, news at 11. But you remember 15 years ago, there was a candidate for mayor Jimmy McMillan. He went viral in 2010. Do we call it viral back then? But with his slogan, the rent is too damn high. Right, right, right.

So what's different with this election? Well, the difference now is that things are even worse. Not only are rents on hyperdrive, we have this vacancy rate that's historically low and the two issues are linked. So that means the number of available apartments out there has dropped to, the lowest number it's been in like 60 years. Yikes. So what are the candidates from they're saying that they want to do to fix the problem? Well, they all want to build more housing. And they say that's the solution to getting these rents under control and making sure there's housing for people of all income levels. There's a Republican nominee Curtis Slewa. His plans

are less ambitious, but he does say he wants to increase housing development along transit lines, it's called transit oriented development. Then there's Andrew Cuomo. He's the independent candidate, you know, might know him as a former governor who actually ran for governor against Jimmy McMillan when the rent was too damn high 15 years ago. He wants to unleash housing development. And he says his housing plan could make a few tweaks early on just to get a lot of new affordable housing approved. His ultimate plan is for like a half million new apartments. And so there's kind of this arms race between him and Zeranamani, the Democratic nominee, who says he could build 200.

hundred thousand units of affordable housing in New York City by putting the city financing and city funding to work so that they'll be affordable to the lowest income New Yorkers and middle income New Yorkers who need housing. You know, all of this starts to sound a lot like what Bloomberg was talking about earlier with Greenpoint and Williamsburg rezoning, kind of this basic economic concept if you build more housing that will meet demand and rent growth will slow and maybe even decline so people can afford to stay here. All right, so if the message here is build, baby, build, what lessons are there to be learned from the rezoning that happened 20 years ago? One big problem here is that Greenpoint added so much new housing, while so many other parts of this city added very little.

And I guess you could blame a lot of that on the Bloomberg administration. You know, at the same time as they allowed more housing in Greenpoint, they put strict limits on the amount of new housing. housing that could get built in a lot of other parts of this city, especially those kind of suburban style, lower density parts of New York City, like Northeast Queens, Staten Island, a lot of the Bronx. That put more pressure on places like Greenpoint to absorb a lot of people who already lived in New York City, a lot of the people living in the neighborhood already, and then a lot of people moving in. The neighborhood got some more social cachet. It became a hot spot. You know, there's Michelin Star restaurants there. It's a place to be. And it's

If you're a landlord, you own a building, suddenly you were charging $2,500 a month, you see your neighbor charging $5,000 a month. You probably want a piece of that. Yeah. Now, Mike Bloomberg isn't so much in the public eye these days, but what has he himself had to say about the criticisms of the rezoning and what has happened in the past two decades in Greenpoint? Well, I'm still waiting for a response from Bloomberg himself, but a lot of officials from his administration have cheered. what's happening there. And one of the people I really wanted to talk to was Raphael Sisterro. Hey, David. How you doing? Hey. He runs the Affordable Housing Investment Group, the Community Preservation Corporation. But 20 years ago, he was a top city housing official who was kind of

one of the public faces of this rezoning plan. You're going to test my memory. He later went on to become the city's housing commissioner under Bloomberg. I don't think it is fair to blame what has happened in rents on the rezoning. I don't think the question is, would Greenpoint have been found? The Greenpoint was already being found and would have been found. There are lots of neighborhoods in New York that didn't have rezoning that have experienced the exact same kind of rent pressures that Greenpoint has. And to me, what has happened to rents and the pressure on neighborhoods that for a very

long time, didn't feel rent pressure, has everything to do with the fact that we haven't built nearly enough housing in the last 30 years to support the growth that has happened in New York City and has less to do with a very specific rezoning in a neighborhood where we did build housing. But he says there are things he wishes the administration had done differently. One of the bigger regrets that I have is not being more aggressive in trying to push for some common sense logical changes to the rent laws. And so I think that that's absolutely a reasonable and fair argument to make in connection with development. How long was it before tenants got those types of protections in the first place? So the rezoning passed in 2005, but it wasn't until 2019

that the state enacted changes to the rent stabilization laws that got rid of a lot of the incentive for driving out tenants. You couldn't increase the rent on an empty apartment. You couldn't take the apartment out of the rent stabilization system altogether and charge whatever you wanted after 2019. And then last year, the state passed another measure called good cause. Good cause is a rule that gives tenants a right to a lease renewal in most cases and it also allows them to challenge quote, exorbitant rent increases. So you can go to court and say, my landlord's charging me too much he needs to justify that. And I think particularly in a neighborhood like Greenpoint, it allows rent increases,

but it provides residents and owners with some certainty about what those are going to be. So tenant protections could have really helped back then. What else could have been done differently? Well, something that a lot of the advocates were talking about back then, including Brad Lander, was requiring affordable housing in the new developments that resulted from their rezoning. Instead, what the Bloomberg administration did was a voluntary program where you could build larger than the zoning rules would allow if you agreed to reserve a portion of the apartments for low and mostly middle-income renters. Along the waterfront, a lot of people did that. But in the years since, it became official city policy that after rezoning, every new apartment building has to have about a quarter of the apartments reserved.

for low and middle-income renters. You talk to people who said that the neighborhood changes have made life a lot harder, but a lot of people have been moving in. Did you talk to anyone who actually appreciates what has happened in the neighborhood? Plenty of people think the changes in Greenpoint are great. I've been spending a lot of time in the neighborhood over the past few weeks talking to residents, and I went over to one of the new buildings right along the waterfront. It's got these beautiful views of Manhattan.

Oh, you want shoes off? I met Brenda and Howard Harris. They're in their late 50s, and they moved into their apartment four years ago. Whoa, I see what you mean about the view. I love my view. You can't pay for a better view. They actually said they were the very first tenants

to move into the building, which was a little eerie at the time. But they were excited when they won the affordable housing lottery for their two-bedroom. Well, I was happy. I was excited. Crazy excited. It was a new change of life for me.

being together by the water because I always wanted to live off the water, but I don't want to live in the woods. I want to live in the city, so it's perfect for me. I'm a New Yorker, and I want to retire here where they've got good doctors, and it's safe. I feel safe, so I'm going to pay for safe. Me and him disagree about a lot of things, but I'm going to pay for it because he's blind.

He can walk down the street. I know no gunshots are going to go off. But Howard did have his trepidations about the move. He talked about his experience as a black teenager going to high school in Williamsburg, not far from the Greenpoint border. I think his experience says a lot about how some people perceive the changes that have happened in this part of Brooklyn. And it started getting dark like four or five o'clock. Over here, it would be like seven o'clock. It would be like almost pitch black.

But they didn't have back then, they didn't have a lot of, you know, lights and, like, you know, street lamps and stuff. the way that we had to walk from school because we was right there by the highway not too far from the BQE. And we used to get chased to the train station, you know, after basketball practice. So who used to chase you after basketball? All the white folks. I don't know if there was white Polish or Italian. They were just white. They were just white.

So the white kids would be like get out of our neighborhood? Yeah. Yeah. Y'all don't belong and get out of here. It's too late for y'all to be out here. What y'all doing over here? You know? Jeez.

When are we talking to 80s? Yeah. But my wife said that was old times. They probably changed by now when they did. You changed? Yeah, I know I changed. So I've been thinking a lot about what. residents have been telling me. Long-time residents, some of the newer arrivals. And a lot of people

said, you know, we don't love the changes, but they also know that change is inevitable, especially in a place like New York City. They just wish there was a way to keep things affordable, even if where they live becomes the next hotspot like it has in Greenpoint. And that's definitely going to be a big and difficult challenge for whoever is elected in November. That's WNYC's David Brand. Thanks a lot, David. Thanks, Janay. And thank you for listening to NYC. now from WMYC. I'm Jene Pierre. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. We'll be back on Monday.