My Family Won the New York Housing Lottery

The End of Eight Decades in Brooklyn

As of next week, for the first time since 1947, no member of my family will live in Brooklyn. To cope with my intense grief and to avoid figuring what to do with the contents of the moving boxes that have been arriving at my house each day—is there any “right” place for a Dior for Boys blazer from 1987?—I set out to answer a question that’s been bugging me, not just about our apartment but about New York itself.

When my parents rented our apartment in Park Slope in 1979, my mother was a New York City schoolteacher and my father had just left a Ph.D. program in English to pursue a career in publishing. Now it’s been sold for I don’t know how many thousand times their first month’s rent. How did the apartment my sister and I grew up in become just another Zillow listing I can’t afford?

One popular story about New York in the 1970s is that it was dirty and disorderly and violent, so most of the the sane people fled. As a result, housing suddenly became affordable for those hardy souls who wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else, martyrs to the madness in the name of art and culture. By this logic, everyone in New York was either too rich to be affected by the mayhem, too poor to move, or Patti Smith.

Rent did not become affordable simply because a lot of people left, however. Rent remained (relatively) affordable because the city had made a policy choice to keep it that way. Before 1969, nearly every apartment built before 1947—which included all of the brownstones and large apartment buildings in a neighborhood like Park Slope and almost all of the housing stock in poor and working-class neighborhoods—was covered by rent control.

New York did in fact lose about ten percent of its population in the 1970s but that wasn’t all due to the well-worn myth that the streets had been overrun by graffiti artists whose subway breakdancing battles inevitably devolved into knife fights that left defenseless straphangers covered in blood and the only ones who could hear them scream were a glassy-eyed punk and a stray dog who just ate heroin.

Rather, New York was in the throes of the type of deindustrialization more commonly associated with a city like Detroit. In 1950, there were about a million manufacturing jobs in New York City, 6.8% of all manufacturing jobs in the entire country. Over the next 25 years, New York would lose half of those blue-collar jobs, with 300,000 alone disappearing between 1969 and 1975.

This shrinking blue-collar workforce, middle-class migration to the suburbs outside New York, and a rapidly growing Black, Puerto Rican and nonwhite immigrant population changed the composition of New York’s renters—and many landlords were so unhappy about it that they not only stopped taking care of their buildings but, in many cases, walked away from them entirely.

Opponents of rent control had long argued that the costs of maintaining and operating aging rent-controlled buildings, many crumbling tenements from the previous century, were outpacing the rents landlords could legally charge. It wasn’t entirely untrue, but property owners who will pretend to no longer own an apartment building and maybe even set it on fire are perhaps less likely to be motivated by sound business principles than, say, racial animus.

A report issued in 1968 by New York’s Housing and Development Administration found that, “To many landlords, minority tenantry is a signal of a building either in decay or about to enter that condition.” Landlords wouldn’t invest in neighborhoods in “decay” and neither would banks, so landlords started abandoning their aging buildings—tens of thousands of apartments each year from the middle of the 1960s through the 1970s, left for dead.

These abandoned buildings have become the enduring image of New York in decline but, and I want to put this delicately, the nature of that decline was experienced very differently in different neighborhoods. As challenging as the 1970s might have been for many New Yorkers, the devastation often ascribed to the entire city was mostly inflicted upon and suffered by Black and Puerto Rican communities.

In a largely white working-class neighborhood like Park Slope, landlords could sell their buildings to upwardly-mobile homesteaders, who would rehabilitate the buildings for their own occupancy. By 1972, none other than Sol Yurick, author of The Warriors, the novel upon which the greatest movie ever made about a gang having to fight their way from the Bronx to Coney Island is based, was already writing in the New York Times a withering takedown of Park Slope’s “invading army” of “lawyers and professors and doctors and architects and psychologists and social workers and writers and newspapermen and city officials and Mayor Lindsay’s daughter and poverty-fund richies who’ve made the transition from idealism to hustler and investment analysts and artists and teachers.”

Gulp. If you want to understand gentrification in Brooklyn you’d do a lot worse than reading just this one essay. (Stay until the end for a foreshadowing of one of cinema’s great attempted taunts.)

Of course, as Yurick references in his piece, every six-unit rooming house converted into a single-family residence removed affordable housing from the market. In 1969, New York started shifting its rent regulations away from rent control and towards rent stabilization, which allowed larger rent increases and only covered buildings with six or more apartments. That would be bad news for tenants in rehabilitated townhouses but tenants of older, larger apartment buildings like ours were still covered by rent stabilization and, in the cases of the older Irish and Italian families who’d lived in in our building since Park Slope was “nice” the first time, rent control.

It was an imperfect but effective protection against at least some displacement. Even as investment by middle-class (and, soon, rich) homeowners made Park Slope more desirable, our rent remained relatively protected by rent stabilization.

We were the beneficiaries of gentrification, but the landlord surely felt left out. Saddled with tenants whose rents he could never raise quite as high as he’d like—and in truth, as high as the market would bear—the only gains from gentrification he could enjoy were a cone from the new Häagen-Dazs or an even greater local luxury in which we were never allowed to indulge, grocery shopping at D’Agostino.

Once again, our landlord had a better option for disposing of his asset than walking away from it or setting it on fire: he could sell it to his tenants. And that’s how my parents, a public-school teacher and a book editor in a rent-stabilized apartment, became homeowners. In 1988, the New York Times reported that over the last decade, “more than 3,000 rental buildings containing 242,000 apartments have become cooperative.” Ours was one of them. (And there went even more affordable housing.)

I’m aware of the many privileges that made this trajectory possible for my family. For one, our landlord didn’t burn down our building rather than fix the boiler. There are a lot of apartment buildings in the Bronx that looked exactly like ours in Brooklyn, constructed in the same era according to the same blueprints, which were neglected and allowed to deteriorate because their residents no longer looked like we did.

It’s easier to believe that cheap housing in New York, when it existed, was a function not of affirmative policy choices but of a demented market in a deranged city. After the fiscal crisis of 1975, New York would find itself in thrall to a business community, heavily populated by real-estate interests, that has worked very successfully to discredit the progressive policy priorities of the blue-collar New Yorkers who’d once dominated New York’s economic and political life.

The high levels of investment in New York in the 1980s offers further evidence that crime and disorder were not necessarily the most critical factors in shaping the housing market in the 1970s. By many measures—murders, subway dysfunction, roaches in your food— the 1980s were worse than the 1970s. Yet we stuck it out—I once found a roach inside a dumpling and another floating in a grape soda and I still eat at both those restaurants.

Brooklyn has been good to my family. We were extremely lucky but that luck wasn’t merely a quirk of a specific time and place. It was the intended result of deliberate policy choices. A future where only the most privileged New Yorkers have access to the opportunities my family has been fortunate enough to enjoy—an affordable rental, a path to homeownership, a generally roach-free meal—is inevitable only if we allow it to be. Some things are too important to be left to the market.