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New York|Black Families Are Leaving New York. Can a Pastor’s Plan End the Exodus?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/nyregion/new-york-black-families-affordable-housing-church.html
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In the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, a pastor is devoting his time to building affordable housing for his congregation.
June 3, 2025Updated 10:15 a.m. ET
On one of the coldest mornings of the year, David K. Brawley stood on the roof of a new home for seniors he had helped create, his coat fluttering in the wind. He surveyed his domain.
He pointed to the left, toward the hazy outline of the Manhattan skyline, to the rows of rental apartments below that he had helped develop. He pointed to the right, toward Jamaica Bay, to the mall and the rowhouses, built on top of landfill and overgrown fields, whose construction he had championed.
Squint, and you could almost see it: his vision of 10,000 more apartments, in new buildings stretching into every undeveloped corner of a neighborhood once known as the murder capital of New York City.
Mr. Brawley, 56, is not a real estate developer. He is the pastor of one of Brooklyn’s most storied Black congregations, St. Paul Community Baptist Church in East New York.
But at a moment when Black families are leaving the city in droves, there’s no way to lead a church like his without having a keen — in his case almost obsessive — interest in building more affordable housing.
It’s the only way he can keep his flock intact.
This corner of Brooklyn, at the edge of one of the most expensive cities on the planet, has long been an epicenter of New York’s Black civil servant class, the people who drive buses, administer food stamps, work with children with disabilities.
