What Greenpoint’s transformation reveals about NYC's housing crisis

Olivia Kozlowski can go block by block in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, telling stories of displacement.

The 38-year-old fashion stylist has lived all her life in the neighborhood, watching — and lamenting — its transformation from a Polish enclave in an old industrial zone to one of Brooklyn’s poshest destinations.

There are the glimmering new high-rise residential towers that replaced warehouse spaces along the East River, but also the pre-war apartment buildings and row houses farther inland, where rising rents have pushed out beloved neighbors.

Now, Kozlowski worries about her ability to stay in the neighborhood where she grew up. StreetEasy recently advertised a one-bedroom apartment in a building next to hers for close to $5,000 a month, roughly double the $2,600 she pays. Her place is not rent-stabilized.

“My landlord will ask me quite often how long I plan to stay in the apartment,” Kozlowski said. “He'll kind of hint at the cost of my apartment, versus the apartments in relating streets or adjacent houses.”

Housing affordability is the key issue in this year’s mayoral race. Each of the three leading candidates have touted plans that rely on a basic economic concept: build more housing as a way to increase supply and, hopefully, curb rising rents.

But no section of the city has added more new homes in recent years than Greenpoint and neighboring Williamsburg, the result of a first-of-its-kind rezoning ushered in by the Bloomberg administration two decades ago. And yet, rents in the area have only continued to increase at breakneck speed, forcing many longtime residents out and serving as a caution for whoever is elected in November about how to increase the city’s housing stock while keeping New Yorkers in their neighborhoods.

In interviews with Gothamist, many residents described an uncertainty about how long they can keep calling Greenpoint home — even those with six-figure incomes. Some, like Kozlowski, have held onto market-rate apartments with lower rents, hoping their situations won’t change anytime soon. Others have recently departed for the suburbs or other parts of the city, while some newcomers have found a refuge in newly built affordable apartments made possible by the rezoning.

“I think it's great,” said Howard Harris, a former entertainment manager who moved to Greenpoint four years ago. “It’s a wonderful place.”

Harris and his wife live in a two-bedroom apartment they won through the city’s housing lottery, which has allowed them to stay in the city where they grew up. They pay $2,165 per month in rent.

Two top mayoral candidates have engaged in a kind of arms race for the biggest affordable housing plans.

Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani has promised to build 200,000 units of city-financed affordable housing, a vision he recently described as “virtuous growth.” Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to streamline construction and speed through a backlog of development applications to immediately break ground on 10,000 more affordable units, part of his goal of a half-million new homes. Republican Curtis Sliwa has called for more new development near transit lines.

Twenty years ago, Mayor Mike Bloomberg had his own plans.

His 2005 rezoning changed land-use rules on a 175-block swath of waterfront in Greenpoint and neighboring Williamsburg, paving the way for tens of thousands of new apartments in an area once designated for heavy industry and manufacturing. At the time, city planners expected 10,500 new condos and apartments would be built there. Instead, developers have so far constructed more than 19,600 in modern high-rises, and another 2,500 are permitted. About 16% of the units are considered “affordable,” with rents capped for mostly middle-income tenants, according to data from the city planning department.

Greenpoint grew increasingly hip, and now features world-renowned restaurants and its own alpine-level skyline. A pair of buildings that look like teetering stacks of toy blocks rise over Eagle and West streets. A hulking, 22-story brick complex stands at 35 Commercial St. and a 40-story tower casts a long shadow above India Street, two blocks north of Transmitter Park. Two new buildings reaching 40 and 30 stories are in the works nearby.

Housing experts and researchers say social and economic forces beyond the 20-year-old rezoning are largely responsible for the boom. Prices have surged in the neighborhood over the last decade, even on blocks far from the waterfront, mirroring a citywide trend as an overall affordable housing shortage increases demand.

The median asking rent in Greenpoint in October 2015 was $2,850, a price tag that later dropped to $2,650 in December 2020 amid a COVD-19 pandemic dip in the market, according to StreetEasy. Today, the 350 Greenpoint apartments posted on StreetEasy as of Oct. 13 had a median rent of nearly $4,700.

‘It shows you what you can do’

So far, Kozlowski has been fortunate: She thinks her landlord tolerates her below-market rent because they’re both Polish — a sort-of hometown discount for a fellow Greenpoint native with shared heritage.

”How much houses are going for in the neighborhood is so shocking to us that grew up here,” she said. “Me and the friends that are still in the neighborhood and have lived here their whole lives, still have that underlying hope that perhaps we'll be the lucky ones.”

But she said she knows that could change. Her parents, who have resided in the same Humboldt Street apartment for almost 40 years, are also worried about a potential rent hike.

“They do have that fear that you just never know,” Kozlowski said. “So their fallback if that happens would be going back to Poland.”

For others, the neighborhood changes have brought opportunity.

Howard and Brenda Harris were the first tenants to move into a brand-new building on the waterfront four years ago. Their 11th-floor, two-bedroom apartment overlooks the East River and offers a panoramic view. The affordably priced unit, which they qualified for based on their income, is the result of the 2005 rezoning.

Building residents have complained of dirty water and busted elevators, but for the Harrises, it’s still a foothold in the five boroughs. Brenda, 58, works as a UPS supervisor and grew up in Queens Village. Howard, 57, previously lived in East New York. The couple have watched numerous relatives flee the city for more affordable parts of the United States.

“I don't want to go down to Florida and retire. I'm a New Yorker and I wanna retire here,” Brenda said. “It was a new change of life for me because I always wanted to live off the water. I don't want to live in the woods.”

But Howard was hesitant at first because of his experience as a Black student in a largely white section of Williamsburg near the Greenpoint border in the 1980s. He described playing on the Harry Van Arsdale High School basketball team and being chased out of McCarren Park by white teenagers at dusk.

“My wife said, 'That was old times. They’ve probably changed by now,'" Howard remembered Brenda saying when they were offered the apartment. “Which they did.”

Howard, who is blind, said he feels safe walking alone through the neighborhood. The couple enjoy trying new local bars and restaurants. When drive-in movies started showing in the empty lot next door, they pulled up chairs to a window in the hall and watched, tuning into the sound on an AM-radio frequency.

“It shows you what you can do when you change the atmosphere of a neighborhood,” Howard said.

Lessons learned

The Harrises' experience is what many supporters of the rezoning envisioned 20 years ago. The sweeping plan was meant to add much-needed housing stock to a neighborhood already undergoing gentrification as artists and young people flocked to Greenpoint in search of rents cheaper than those in Manhattan, or even neighboring Williamsburg.

“Greenpoint was already being ‘found,’” said Rafael Cestero, a former housing commissioner under Bloomberg who now runs the Community Preservation Corporation, an affordable housing investor. “The rezoning was about building more housing. And the fact that rents have doubled in Greenpoint is a reflection on the fact that we haven't built enough housing citywide.”

Two decades ago, the Bloomberg administration did not want to require developers to build the kind of affordable housing that has benefitted the Harrises. Instead, participation in the program was voluntary — a trade-off in exchange for permission to add more floors to market-rate apartment buildings. Cestero said City Hall officials didn’t think they could force developers, because it wasn’t yet clear how lucrative the new buildings would be.

“I think it's important to understand in 2005 we didn't really know where the real estate market was going. We were still only four years out from 9/11,” he said. ” What we tried to do is create the incentive to do it.”

At the time, Brad Lander — now the city's comptroller and a fixture of local politics — was the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, a nonprofit helping organize neighbors who wanted more from the rezoning than what Bloomberg was offering. Then and now, Lander said the city should have required affordable apartments in new buildings as part of the rezoning.

“A mandatory program was needed and would've produced many more affordable units, and that is the model that we now have,” he said in a recent interview with Gothamist.

It wasn’t until 2016, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, that the city enacted those mandatory inclusionary housing policies. They compelled developers to price a quarter of new units for low- and middle-income tenants in buildings constructed after a rezoning.

Another effort that even Cestero and other Bloomberg administration officials say they regret: a decision limiting new development in about 40% of the city, even as they were lifting height restrictions on the waterfront. Those restraints are widely panned by housing experts today, and likely added pressure on places like Greenpoint to absorb new residents.

The city has chipped away at these limits under Mayor Eric Adams with new rules allowing for more housing construction in every neighborhood. The next mayor will inherit these policies, along with new rezonings in Midtown Manhattan, Jamaica and Long Island City in Queens, and elsewhere — fueling more widespread development.

A need to protect existing tenants

Lander also pointed to a need for stronger tenant protections before the rezoning took effect. Those also wouldn’t come until much later.

While the city contributed $2 million to a temporary legal fund to help tenants challenge evictions or harassment by landlords looking to cash in on the boom, it wasn’t until 2019 that state law prohibited landlords from raising rents on empty rent-stabilized apartments and it became all but impossible to remove a unit from rent stabilization.

Tenants had to wait until last year for another new law, known as good cause, that gives most renters a right to lease renewal and the power to challenge “exorbitant” rent increases in court.

Maresa Ponitch, 47, said she hopes the good-cause measure will allow her family to remain in the Manhattan Avenue apartment she and her husband first moved into 19 years ago. A lot has changed since then, especially their view.

“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,” Ponitch said. “Now if you stand in just the right place you can see a sliver of the Empire State Building.”

Ponitch’s time in Greenpoint traces much of its recent transformation. She owns a vintage clothing business she previously ran out of a neighborhood warehouse. When she first moved to Greenpoint, she said she pulled vintage items from local “rag yards” — warehouses stuffed with discarded clothing destined for foreign countries — to resell at Urban Outfitters.

Many of those industrial sites are long gone. One of the buildings where she worked, near the corner of West and Java streets, was converted to condos about 15 years ago. Ponitch said she and her husband considered buying a unit there at the time, but decided against it, leaving her with mixed feelings now. The condo values have approximately tripled: A third-floor one-bedroom listed at about $330,000 in 2010 sold in July for $925,000, according to online listings.

Ponitch described herself as “Greenpoint's No. 1 fan” and said she has no plans to leave, even though the Instagramification of the neighborhood annoys her.

“I believe that change is good and whatever kind of curmudgeonly feelings I have don't really matter,” she said. “But my concern for this city as a whole is that people can continue to live here.”

The Greenpoint that was

Many New Yorkers can’t afford to stay in the city. A 2023 report by the nonprofit Fiscal Policy Institute found high housing costs were the main factor driving low- and middle-income families out of the five boroughs. And in poll after poll, city voters have pinpointed affordable housing as their top concern.

“It's the No. 1 reason that New Yorkers are becoming residents of Jersey City, of Pennsylvania, of Connecticut,” Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral nominee, said at an event in the Bronx in early October. “Because they cannot afford this city."

Former Gov. Cuomo has framed the risk in existential terms. “The high cost of housing is perhaps the greatest threat to New York’s prosperity, culture, and long-term growth,” his housing plan states.

Lucy Collins, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, is still grappling with that reality.

She moved to the neighborhood in 2007, and began renting a Noble Street row house with her husband and two children eight years ago. They paid $5,000-a-month — a decent deal she attributed to a generous landlord. But when that landlord sold the building earlier this year, Collins and her family had to leave.

“When you start looking at what else was available in Greenpoint, remotely comparable rent was not even remotely comparable space,” she said.

Instead, the family purchased a home on a quiet road in Dobbs Ferry in Westchester County, just a short walk from the downtown shopping area. Their neat backyard is shaded by a giant tree and decorated with a string of filament bulbs. Collins bought her son a new mountain bike for the local trails.

Less than two months after moving, Collins said she was dealing with nostalgia for her old life and trying to make sense of what felt like forced displacement. She said Greenpoint became a destination for wealthy New Yorkers, tourists and influencers at the same time she was taking her kids to the park down the street and grabbing pizza from Paulie Gee's.

“ It is a grief and a loss of a time gone by, because it isn't the Greenpoint that I moved to in 2007 or 2008,” Collins said. “And I think that's what a lot of us are feeling as well. We wish we could just bring our kids and all that back to that time.”