Decades ago, in a dig at the tastemakers of the time, Truman Capote wrote, “I live in Brooklyn. By Choice.” These days, of course, Brooklyn is an international brand, and there is no shame in living in it. Except, that is, if you live in Gowanus, a once-empty but now flourishing part of the borough that has become the latest target of progressive anti-urbanism.
I, too, live in Gowanus, by choice. For those new to the conversation: the tastemakers at New York published a feature earlier this month, “Gowanopolis Rising,” about the neighborhood and everything wrong with it. The central complaint seems to be that it is built around the Gowanus Canal, an EPA-designated Superfund site that has cost hundreds of millions of dollars to dredge and clean up. An additional complaint is that, while the new buildings include plenty of affordable housing, most of the apartments are market-rate.
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Those basic facts sent New York real estate reporter Kim Velsey searching—unsuccessfully—for new residents willing to agree that Gowanus is unhealthy, and that the asking prices for the new apartments there are absurd. “It might seem unlikely,” the author writes, eyebrow arched, “that people of means would choose to live in Gowanus.” In fact, it is not unlikely; nor are most of the new residents “people of means.”
The complaints about Gowanus are just a distilled version of the kind of opposition to housing that dismisses any building as insufficiently affordable, damaging to neighborhood character, and (if it passes every other test) just in poor taste. The thrust of these complaints, year in and year out, is to condemn New Yorkers to the status quo of inadequate and substandard housing.
My family and I moved into a new development in Gowanus in June. We did not expect to be in a rental or in a new building. We’d sold the brownstone apartment we had lived in since 2010 (beautiful, but our son’s bedroom was a converted closet). Our plans to buy a new place had crashed into the realities of New York’s overpriced market.
Let me get out of the way the question that every New Yorker wants answered: How much are you paying? The base rent for the two-bedroom we moved into—with the newly and still imperfectly cleaned canal on one side and views of Manhattan on the other—is $6,990 a month. We signed a lease for two years plus four additional free months from a developer eager to fill the new building. That brings the average monthly cost down, for now, to about $6,000. We also got some other incentives—like free utilities for a year, and a deposit of just $1,000—that are now standard in new buildings.
People in many parts of the country will be shocked by that price, and the professional housing lobby will dismiss our apartment as “luxury”—a basic marketing term that solicits sneers in the upside-down world where any improvement in housing stock is seen as delaying the revolution. Indeed, the building we moved into comes closer to the label than most. It has amenities like a gym, a roof deck, and office spaces. More importantly, it has floor-to-ceiling windows with beautiful light, a feature once seen as a nonpartisan good.
But the alternative to new developments like these is not only deeply substandard; it’s often barely cheaper. At about the $6,000-a-month price range or close to it, my wife and I also saw a tightly squeezed, shoddily renovated apartment on the second floor of a very nice brownstone, wedged between the apartments of the owner and his parents. We looked at a walkup above a corner store with rooms the size of closets and window air-conditioner units. Then we toured an apartment building that was nicely situated by the park but had a three-burner stove and no place to put a table. These apartments typically had higher move-in costs and more exorbitant demands for tenants’ income than do the new developments.
New Yorkers who haven’t lucked into a “deal” (like Mayor Mamdani’s own rent-controlled apartment) have dealt with rentals like these for decades. Their choice isn’t between decrepit housing and luxury housing. Usually, the only choice is decrepit housing at luxury prices. Keeping the supply of housing artificially low has gotten New Yorkers used to this reality.
Rezoning a Superfund site to allow the building of 8,000 to 9,000 new apartment units, many earmarked as affordable, is exactly the kind of success that blue cities like New York should wish for. It’s the culmination of a process that started with Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg, continued with Democrat Bill de Blasio, and—to his credit—was promoted by progressive congressional candidate Brad Lander.
That the Gowanus developers and the city were able to navigate the gauntlet of the usual opposition groups is nothing short of miraculous. As per usual, neighborhood gadflies tried to stop the development with contradictory claims that it would harm current residents and that the area was too dirty to live in anyway. (New York has kept up a drumbeat of evidence-free claims that the “notorious Superfund site” would be too toxic for anyone to move into.) Turns out New Yorkers aren’t credulous enough to fall for scientific-sounding scare stories. New residents like me are the living proof.
Underneath the faux health concerns, foes of development of any kind are selling the same old story that anything but government-subsidized housing is good only for the rich. The subtext is that anything that departs from the substandard norms New Yorkers have gotten used to is somehow too good, as if homes offering both views and natural light are inherently suspicious.
Fortunately, New Yorkers are starting to see through this. They’re flocking to the new buildings in Gowanus, as well as others in downtown Brooklyn, where a record 4,400 residential units were completed in 2025. As expensive as the new developments are, they at least serve as a counterweight to the disastrous rent-control policies that have left more and more New York City apartments vacant and decrepit.
The New York story ends with the writer talking to a new renter who resolutely refuses to diss his neighborhood: “I have a corner unit, and I can see the Statue of Liberty.” My own apartment happens to be right across the Gowanus Canal from that renter and similarly situated on the 14th floor. Instead of the Statue of Liberty, I see One World Trade Center and lower Manhattan from my balcony.
In the backwards logic that permeates discussions of development, I am supposed to feel guilty that I have chosen to live in a place built by a greedy developer, instead of a wreck filled with old Brooklyn character. In fact, I feel hopeful that, out of New York’s decades-long housing nightmare, a new, more livable city can still rise.