Greenpoint’s Housing Boom Delivers Towers, Not Relief, as Rents Outpace Rezoning Promises

Greenpoint’s metamorphosis into a chic enclave offers sobering lessons for New York’s housing crisis, challenging the orthodoxy that more building alone cures unaffordability.

On a recent autumn morning, one could stand on Greenpoint’s riverside and watch the sunlight glint off glassy high-rises—architectural totems of what New Yorkers now call “Brooklyn’s Gold Coast.” Yet for locals like Olivia Kozlowski, a lifelong resident and fashion stylist, the transformation is less dazzling. Kozlowski’s rent, now a manageable $2,600 per month for a one-bedroom, feels precarious as neighboring apartments list for nearly $5,000—a sum so puny against Manhattan’s soaring averages, but for her, the difference between belonging and exile.

This dilemma, familiar across New York City, is especially acute in Greenpoint. Long a working-class, Polish enclave marbled with warehouses and modest rowhouses, the neighborhood underwent the city’s most ambitious housing rezoning in two decades, under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Planners gambled that infusing new housing—especially along the East River’s disused industrial tracts—would increase supply and invite affordability by textbook law of economics. In raw terms, it worked: no corner of the five boroughs added more dwellings in the past 15 years than Greenpoint and adjacent Williamsburg.

Yet, as even casual observers and panicked tenants attest, the rent crisis not only persisted but accelerated. Kozlowski’s story is typical: in the shadow of cranes and construction, longtime tenants field not-so-subtle hints from landlords eyeing richer prospects. On inland blocks, unprotected by rent stabilization, residents who once paid market rates within reach now calculate their exile’s timetable. Gentrification, notorious bugbear of city politics, metastasizes by the month.

For newcomers, the new towers offer both spectacle and reprieve. Howard Harris, a long-time New Yorker recently displaced from elsewhere, counts himself lucky—he and his wife secured a two-bedroom through the city’s housing lottery, pegged at $2,165, a figure which would elicit envy in large swathes of Brooklyn. Yet these lottery-won flats are both oversubscribed (with odds boding only slightly better than a decent scratch-off) and a slender fraction of total construction.

Citywide, the lesson is inescapable: if Greenpoint’s breakneck building could not outpace the gravitational pull of demand and speculative capital, what hope is there in mere quantity? Politicians have nevertheless doubled down. This year’s two top mayoral candidates, Democrat Zohran Mamdani and former governor Andrew Cuomo, outbid each other with promises to build 200,000 subsidized units by 2035—a contest Mamdani dubbed “virtuous growth,” as though scale alone portends virtue.

But “build, baby, build” is too blunt an instrument. The Greenpoint experiment shows that fresh inventory, in a market untethered from ironclad regulation, often catalyzes further speculation. Developers, seeing a once-feared industrial neighborhood beckon wealthy strivers, bet accordingly—pricing their new construction for the affluent, or at best, the professional classes. In the process, they inadvertently raise the value, and thus the cost, of every pre-war walk-up and modest brownstone.

The consequences for the city are profound. New York’s population, long buoyant, has recently begun to ebb for the first time in decades. More than 200,000 New Yorkers decamped for cheaper pastures last year, according to census data, many citing housing costs. As old community stalwarts flee, they take with them the tacit infrastructure—familial networks, ethnic businesses, school volunteers—that once rendered Greenpoint so resilient.

The broader economic ramifications warrant scrutiny. On the one hand, gentrification and luxury construction goose tax revenues and, at the margins, add jobs in property management and service. On the other hand, they fuel a citywide malaise: if even people with six-figure incomes find the rent uncouth, what hope for teachers and hospital workers? Rising rents are to New York’s talent pipeline what barnacles are to a ship’s hull—insidious, slow-moving, but ultimately detrimental to the city’s vaunted dynamism.

Nationally, New York’s woes fit within a grim tapestry. Across America, urban housing shortages have proven stubborn: from Los Angeles to Austin, even cities that counted on vertical expansion have rarely achieved deep affordability. Rezoning is necessary, but not sufficient. Europe’s richest cities—Vienna most famously—tether supply increases to strict affordability mandates and public ownership. Greenpoint’s outcome thus reflects a particularly American hesitancy: faith in markets without adequate guardrails.

Rezoning alone cannot guarantee affordability

So what is the lesson for the next mayor, and indeed, for any would-be urban reformer? Greenpoint’s arc portends both optimism and warning. The intent to add housing was noble and, in part, successful; it sheltered at least some residents, like Mr Harris, from rent spikes. But in the absence of broader measures—universal rent stabilization, aggressive public housing, or bolder affordability quotas—new supply is apt to benefit those already winning the rat race.

We reckon New Yorkers are grown-ups; they accept, if not embrace, churn and reinvention. But the current trend is unsustainable, not merely for sentimental reasons, but for the city’s long-term fiscal and social health. The next wave of policy must blend supply increases with measures to ensure that “affordable” is not just a label affixed to lottery tickets but a condition of daily life for a broad middle.

In the end, the story of Greenpoint is less about luxury towers or artisanal coffee than about whether the gains of growth can be distributed widely, not hoarded at the penthouse. For a city defined as much by its strivers as its moguls, solving this conundrum will take more than zoning tweaks and building permits. Until then, the glinting skyline masks anxieties that no amount of steel and glass can simply wish away. ■