The famed economist John Maynard Keynes allegedly said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
Rachel Rivera clings to her myths. “When they say rezoning, I think of gentrification,” she recently told The City Reporter’s Greg David.
She was one of the many activists who protested the 2016 East New York rezoning, which has since proven to be a huge success. Thanks to the housing development it triggered, thousands more New Yorkers of color live in the Brooklyn neighborhood than before, David wrote.
No, these are not Black and Latino gentrifiers. Today’s East New York residents tend to be poorer than before the 2016 rezoning, in part because a low income is required to qualify for more than 60 percent of the new apartments.
East New York’s median household income in 2012 was $44,000, which in today’s dollars would be nearly $69,000. Yet the actual median income now is just $52,000.
Why, you might ask, won’t Rivera accept that the rezoning housed exactly the kind of poor families she claims to champion?
“For many people, a challenge to their worldview feels like an attack on their personal identity and can cause them to harden their position,” a professor noted in a piece about cognitive dissonance.
Studies show that people double down on erroneous beliefs when confronted with evidence that proves them wrong. This is true for left-wingers like Rivera, who hails from the activist group New York Communities for Change, as well as for right-wingers, like those who insisted bail reform caused crime to spike during the pandemic.
For folks who think developers are evil and only build “luxury” housing that displaces Black and brown residents with whites, what’s happened in East New York is hard to fathom.
But it’s actually easy to understand. Just as the Department of City Planning predicted, for years after the rezoning passed, developers couldn’t persuade investors and lenders to fund market-rate projects in East New York.
The Real Deal reported in 2023 that the rezoning had not delivered the expected increase in new units. What did pencil out? Affordable housing.
That takes much longer to develop. It requires patching together numerous funding sources — tax credits, grants and loans — and waiting for understaffed, bureaucratic agencies. Often it involves lining up a nonprofit partner. Many real estate firms lack the experience, expertise or inclination to do this.
The East New York rezoning was projected to create 6,500 homes in 15 years. In one decade, it has created about 6,000, of which 62 percent are income-restricted.
The young urban professionals flocking to Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick haven’t warmed up to East New York yet, but eventually they will.
Lower prices will draw them, as will improvements that Bill de Blasio’s administration promised in a deal to secure then-Council member Rafael Espinal’s support for the rezoning.
When these higher earners arrive, more market-rate projects like this one will be funded to absorb them, diversifying the neighborhood without displacing residents of the 3,700 new, permanently affordable units.
Rivera might be disgruntled because, she claims, she had to move from East New York to Brownsville when her rent-stabilized building was sold and went market-rate.
Such conversions are almost impossible now, because of changes to laws and regulations, and even when Rivera moved they could hardly happen without buyouts for tenants.
Regardless, Rivera ought to be thrilled at what’s happening in her old neighborhood. She should round up her fellow activists, apologize to Espinal and de Blasio for accusing them of selling out East New York, and thank them for what it’s become.
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