For the better part of the 35 years that she lived in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, Dorinda Pannell made affordable housing her top — if not singular — mission.
A lifelong Democrat, tenant leader with East Brooklyn Congregations and avid voter, Ms. Pannell, 75, known to her neighbors in the Linden Houses as “Miss P,” spent years organizing her fellow residents to push for better housing conditions. She even took her fight to City Hall to give a speech about it.
Now she is following New York’s mayoral primary closely, hopeful that the city’s next leader will do more for the millions of New Yorkers experiencing housing insecurity, particularly longtime Black and Latino residents who say that good-quality, affordable places to live are more and more elusive.
But she will not be voting in the primary or be able to see for herself how the next mayoral administration affects her community. For the last five years, Ms. Pannell has lived in Hampton, Va., where she can be closer to her son, obtain better health care and enjoy what she believes is a higher quality of life and lower cost of living.
“I’m still sad that I had to leave, you know?” she said, pointing to the organizing work she felt she had to put on hold. When it came time to move, she added, “I never cried so hard.”
Ms. Pannell is one of the hundreds of thousands of Black New Yorkers who over the last decade have made the excruciating choice to leave the city they’ve called home for generations.
Citing the near-impossibility of securing affordable housing, the poor quality of public housing or the chance to be closer to family members who have already made the move, many Black American residents who have lived, worked and voted in New York for years are finding it much harder to stay.
Their departures, which span New York’s age brackets and boroughs, have been difficult for demographers to fully quantify amid the city’s pandemic-induced population swings.
Even as New York’s population decreased during the Covid-19 pandemic before bouncing back this year, most reliable surveys of the city’s demographics show that the proportion of Black residents has remained largely unchanged. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, an annual nationwide assessment of demographics, found that New York’s population of Black residents was roughly the same as it was 20 years ago, though that population now skews older.
Still, New York’s suburban counties, which show a sharp uptick in Black residents, are perhaps the strongest evidence that the city’s Black population is changing and may be decreasing.
And in corners of historically Black neighborhoods around New York, community leaders and residents alike say they have noticed real political and demographic shifts that stand to threaten the endurance of New York’s once-ironclad Democratic coalition, long bolstered by the millions of Black voters who are vital to the party’s successes.
“This is a staunch Democratic base, but yet it’s starting to erode because of the departure of a lot of Black people in the area,” said the Rev. Dr. Adolphus Lacey, the senior pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Old school Democrats are leaving.”
The number of Black registered voters in the city has also remained steady for the last two decades. But the confluence of several crises — affordability, public safety and housing availability — makes it clear how the same trends that disproportionately harm Black Americans are also driving some of them out of New York.
The mounting problems have amplified discontent among Black voters, who in interviews pointed to a perceived lack of political will from the Democratic leaders they have supported en masse for decades to solve them.
The contentious Democratic primary for mayor marks the first real electoral test of this key bloc’s loyalties since the November presidential election. The Black voters and organizers fighting to remain in the city are leveraging their political influence to push the party to make progress on an issue that could shape the contours of New York’s Democratic coalition for a generation.
As New York’s housing costs soar, southern cities like Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte have become home to a growing population of ex-New Yorkers. Some observers have described the dynamic as a reverse Great Migration, harking back to the waves of Black Americans who left the South for better opportunities in the Northeast and Midwest during the early 20th century.
The relatively steady size of New York’s Black population also obscures how much it has changed over the years. Twenty years ago, nearly two-thirds of Black New Yorkers were born in the United States, were non-Hispanic and identified only as Black, according to census data. Now just under half of Black New Yorkers identify as Latino, multiracial, foreign-born or some combination of all three.
Some experts see changes to the city’s Black population as part of its long history of ever-fluctuating demographics. And the influence of New York’s Black voters remains clear at the height of Democratic politics in the state — Black Democrats currently lead City Hall, the City Council and both chambers of the State Legislature.
“All ethnic groups go through a rise and fall in New York City politics,” said John Mollenkopf, the director of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY, who added that “Important traces of those groups remain in very influential perches” in the city.
Still, for residents and leaders who have lived in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods for decades, the changes in the character of their communities are as palpable as the rising housing costs.
“You can see it in the ownership, you can see it in the apartments, you can see it in just who’s in the neighborhood and who’s not here in the neighborhood now,” said State Senator Cordell Cleare, whose Harlem district has seen a precipitous decline in Black residents over the last two decades. “People are leaving because they can’t afford to be here. Not because they don’t love this community.”
In early June, the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation — one of the oldest and largest organizing networks in the country — gathered at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in East New York to lay out the scale of the housing crunch to five of the top-polling mayoral candidates.
The group, which is nonpartisan, called for affordable housing, improved public housing conditions and steps to address the city’s mental health crisis. Thousands in the crowd of housing organizers, tenants, union workers and religious and community leaders were bused to the event from union halls and churches across the city. They quickly filled the church’s sanctuary and overflow spaces.
Yolanda Moore, 57, a retired police sergeant who has lived in East New York for more than 40 years, addressed the crowd as a tenant leader with East Brooklyn Congregations, a local affiliate of Metro I.A.F. She is a lifelong New Yorker who fights for affordable housing in hopes of keeping her family and close friends in their communities.
She described how hurtful it was to watch Black retirees who have been lauded for their contributions to the city, as civil servants and loyal Democratic voters, struggling the most to afford to live here.
Ms. Moore said she and her neighbors felt their policy demands were part of a larger push for accountability against a pattern they said had become commonplace in electoral politics.
“These candidates have to stop coming into Black, brown, Hispanic communities and making promises to get the vote and then totally ignoring us,” she said. “These are our taxpayer dollars that are paying your salary. As much as you take from us, we need for somebody to be honest and stick to their word.”
The Democrats running for mayor have all presented ambitious housing plans. Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who leads in most primary polls, has pledged to spend $2.5 billion to overhaul the New York City Housing Authority and accelerate plans to revitalize housing on city lands. He promised to meet with Metro I.A.F.’s leaders on the first day of his administration if he is elected. Zohran Mamdani, the state assemblyman who is the race’s other front-runner, is calling for construction of 200,000 rent-stabilized homes and has made freezing rents a cornerstone of his campaign message.
Mr. Mamdani centered the city’s changing Black population in a closing message on Monday. In a video shared on Instagram, several of his Black supporters said that rising costs were making it more difficult to stay in the city, bolstering their support for his campaign’s focus on affordability.
Other candidates have put forth mammoth proposals for additional housing: Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, has pledged to build 500,000 new homes, as has Brad Lander, the city comptroller. Michael Blake, a former assemblyman, proposed building 600,000.
But the influential Black religious leaders who have watched their own congregants get priced out say that policy promises and church visits are not enough.
Scores of pastors, looking back on Democrats’ failed strategies during the presidential campaign, have eschewed endorsements of any candidate in the primary. Instead, they are asking that those who visit their pulpits come not to solicit votes during an election season, but instead to present a plan to keep the faithful in their pews — and, in some cases, to interest them in turning back out.
“We think that in this last presidential election, there were opportunities missed to hear from the voters — that elected officials were not listening,” said the Rev. Dr. David K. Brawley, the senior pastor of St. Paul and a national co-chair of Metro I.A.F. “And there are some consequences for not listening.”
Tawana Myers, 63, has lived in the Linden Houses in East New York for more than 40 years and is also a tenant leader with East Brooklyn Congregations. Over the last decade, she watched her children, grandchildren and close friends leave New York for more affordable places in Massachusetts and Maryland.
She often considered joining them, especially as the dust and mold from past renovations in her building left her with lingering health problems. But she sees the issue as bigger than just her own challenges.
“Why should I run from where I grew up all my life? Where my doctors are — people that know me, that could help me?” she said. “I have the right to live in my community where I raised my children, where the people know me and I know them.”
Ms. Pannell reckoned with a similar choice. Large actions like the rally at St. Paul, her home church, were exactly what she hoped would help keep the neighborhood she loves intact. She used to organize similar events as a tenant leader, and she returns periodically to help continue the fight.
But this year, she watched from outside New York, joining hundreds of other supporters tuned into a YouTube livestream.
Reporting was contributed by Eliza Shapiro, Bianca Pallaro and Robert Gebeloff.
Maya King is a Times reporter covering New York politics.
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