We’ve Seen New York’s White Flight Before

Just south of downtown Brooklyn, right beyond the brownstones of Boerum Hill, are the Gowanus Houses: a foliage-covered public-housing complex, home to mostly Black and Latino families. Like the majority of residents in New York City, mostly everyone here has stayed amid the pandemic, and a good few said they wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Why would I go anywhere? This is home; I was born around here, been here forever,” Jaime Gonzalez, a 51-year-old man who lives near the houses, told me, as we stood beside a store across the street from the complex. Gonzalez, who asked only half-jokingly if I was an undercover cop before agreeing to speak with me, doesn’t care much for the news media. So he hadn’t heard about the Very Online backlash to and, specifically, to the essay titled.”