A redshift, according to astrophysicists, occurs when a celestial object moves away from our earthly point of observance. Electromagnetic wavelengths stretch out, decreasing in frequency and energy, which causes us to perceive them on the crimson end of the visible light spectrum. As the universe expands, without concerted effort, most objects within it move away from our terrestrial position and thus vary in color. A redshift, according to a political scientist or liberal New Yorker, might represent something similar—a departure from an assumed point of view and partisan identity.
In the 2024 presidential election, just such a redshift rocked New York City. Though Donald Trump won only about 30 percent of the city’s total vote, this marked an improvement of more than 10 percent over his 2020 result. Scarlet splotches pooled out across electoral maps, most potently in predominantly nonwhite areas of the city. In the outer boroughs, particularly in central thoroughfares such as Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens, Black, Latino, and Asian votes moved to the right, or stayed home on Election Day, in record numbers.
Manhattan, meanwhile, maintained its azure coloring—with one striking exception. In the most densely populated county in the country, Trump won a single electoral district, the smallest unit of political administration, a drop of blood in a deep blue sea. Nestled between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, District 65016, with just under a thousand eligible voters, registered four-to-one as Democrats versus Republicans, swung for Trump over Kamala Harris, 265 votes to 255, with two write-ins. A tiny sample size amid millions of other votes in the city, to be sure, but closer examination of the district’s flip reveals fault lines within the liberal coalition—and an unlikely political trajectory for what was once recognized as the most progressive patch of housing in the whole city.
Knickerbocker Village. Benoit Tardif
The electoral district win marked the GOP’s first presidential foothold in Manhattan since 2012, when Mitt Romney swept all six voters in a minuscule Park Avenue district near the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. (He also tied Obama with 110 votes each in the district containing Trump Tower.) Standing in stark contrast to these glitzy skyscraper enclaves is District 65016, the entirety of which is contained within the western half of a single housing complex—Knickerbocker Village. A behemoth comprising nearly 1,600 apartments across a dozen brick towers, the middle-income project was the nation’s first to receive federal funding. It remains a bastion of affordability in a rapidly gentrifying downtown. Unlike white and white-shoe Midtown, according to census figures its demographics stand at 78 percent Asian (largely Chinese) and less than 20 percent white, with a median annual household income of only $25,000.
But just as the election results buried the notion that demographics are destiny, so too did Knickerbocker Village buck voting patterns in Chinatown and Two Bridges, where Harris won around 70 percent of the ballot. Districts 65018 and 65012, which are spanned by the Alfred E. Smith Houses, a large public housing development, and the two precincts that constitute the massive middle-income cooperative at Confucius Plaza—to name a few examples—voted roughly along the same margins, as did Knickerbocker Village in Trump’s first two presidential runs. (In 2024, the complex’s eastern flank, District 65015, only slightly favored the Democratic candidate, and in 2021, with marginally different district lines, half of 65016 voted narrowly for Republican Curtis Sliwa. In other words, Knickerbocker Village’s redshift has been a gradual process.)
The city’s Brooklyn and Queens Chinatowns are already several shades more red than their Manhattan counterpart, to say nothing about the changing political affiliations among Chinese voters, many of whom concerned about anti-Asian hate crimes and opposed to education reforms nationwide. Speaking to the New York Post, Chinese residents of Knickerbocker Village expressed frustration about what they perceived as a permissiveness toward chronic drug use and preferential policies from which new migrants benefited. The tabloid seized on this resentment even while noting, in an aside, that crime stats are declining. Only scarcely more sensational were a series of viral posts on X that incorrectly identified the red blemish on Manhattan’s blue complexion as Dimes Square, the illusory “microneighborhood” identified with a mostly online pandemic-era right-leaning scene. (The district that actually contains Dimes, the eponymous café at the geographic center of this demimonde, voted 81 percent for Harris.)
But general trends fail to explain why one housing complex would vote so differently than nearby areas with similar populations experiencing the same local crime, street homelessness, and public drug use. One possible distinction: Knickerbocker Village has been rocked by a number of high-profile disputes among landlord, tenants, and local government. Of late, residents have organized into not one but two rival tenant associations to (unsuccessfully) resist the rollout of a mandatory Israeli-made biometric facial scan system as well as (semisuccessfully) reject multiple attempts to deregulate the income-restricted complex, currently governed by an obscure web of rules.
Redshifts don’t simply represent a movement away from a fixed point but an overall drop in frequency and energy. Though organized activity within Knickerbocker Village remains strong, turnout in the 2024 presidential election dropped 13 percent from four years prior.
One might assume that organized tenants fighting against their landlord would naturally fall on the left, especially when receiving strong support from local Democratic elected officials, as Knickerbocker Village’s occupants have. But precarity and broken promises can create a sense of political nihilism or even curdle into reaction. Being continually forced to fight to preserve a stable home is a radicalizing experience—in either direction. Though it is unlikely that residents decided their presidential vote based primarily on struggles with their local housing regulatory schemes, it’s also dubious to claim the complex’s simultaneous political shifts—a rightward electoral drift amid intensified tenant organizing—bore no relationship to one another.
THE REDDENING OF KNICKERBOCKER VILLAGE isn’t exactly a novel development when viewed against a complex history of tenant precarity, raucous battles with a rogue’s gallery of landlords, and politically radical residents. Before there was Knickerbocker Village, there was the Lung Block, an archetypally overcrowded zone of Lower East Side tenements, dubbed as such by muckraking reformer Ernest Poole for its high rates of tuberculosis. In a 1903 sociological study reprinted in the New-York Tribune, Poole described the Lung Block as being “honeycombed with rooms” for four thousand people. “To squeeze in more homes,” he wrote
light and air are slowly shut out. Halls, courts, airshafts, are all left ramped and deep and sunless. In a block so congested the plague spreads swiftly. In the last nine years alone, this block has reported 265 cases. From doctors, druggists, and all others who know, I gathered that this is but half the true number.
Comprehensive, hygienic redevelopment of the site promised reprieve for afflicted residents. Fred F. French, an enterprising real estate mogul fresh off his swanky Tudor City development, had hoped to replicate his success downtown, but the Great Depression scuttled the project. New Deal largess convinced a struggling French to scale back his ambitions. Loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation—set up in 1932 by Herbert Hoover to shore up the banking system and quickly expanded for home-building purposes—financed both the demolition of the Lung Block and the creation of its replacement. New York state granted a twenty-year abatement on increases in property taxes, and the newly minted New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) extended an $8 million loan to French in expectation of 1,593 units capped at a 6 percent return. Apartments were to feature parquet floors, refrigerators, tiled bathrooms, and exterior-facing windows and rented for about $12 to $15 per room, well above the neighborhood’s $5 average. Tenant income was capped at five times an apartment’s rent. Constructed in under two years, the middle-income block-filler opened with a ceremony attended by Governor Alfred E. Smith and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. But the presence of these two stalwart welfarists belied French’s unwillingness to rehouse the 379 families that reportedly desired to stay in place. Four-fifths of those families were forced to find lodging in other tenement slums.
The new residents, though much more likely to be white-collar professionals, carried on the discontent of their predecessors. Within weeks of moving in, six hundred tenants launched a rent strike, citing “sixteen specific grievances, including the charge of ‘gross mismanagement, violation of agreements and abusive treatment of tenants’ by the management.” Elevators were out of service; apartments floors and bathroom and kitchen fixtures weren’t finished; walls were left unpainted; and laundry rooms, radio hookups, and other much-advertised modern features were inoperable. Strikers, forty-four lawyers and seventeen journalists among them, deftly utilized the press to shame French for “violating in almost every respect the agreement under which [his company] obtained an $8,000,000 loan.” The action was settled within two months, with tenants winning a collective total of $25,000 (around $600,000 today) in reimbursements damages and promises for imminent repairs.
Riding high on their success, the victors formalized their activities in the Knickerbocker Village Tenant Association (KVTA), a move that was met with immediate resistance. Not only did the French Company refuse to provide meeting space for the group, it even created a rival tenant association whose anti-KVTA newsletter it funded. The following summer, the leases of seventeen “red” residents were not renewed. Rather than crush the KVTA, retaliation energized those in its ranks; membership swelled to over a thousand, and its leaders were elevated to the status of evangelists in the citywide tenant movement.
In 1936, thousands of tenants across Manhattan, including residents of Knickerbocker Village and French’s Tudor City, struck in support of building maintenance workers who had walked off the job to protest poor working conditions—a show of solidarity that merited front-page coverage in the Daily News. Women picketed while pushing their babies in carriages; Communist congressman Vito Marcantonio helped boost the publicity of the effort; and Mayor La Guardia volunteered to shepherd the inevitable arbitration. By the end of the year, the KVTA had joined with Harlem’s Consolidated Tenant League, a majority-Black union with roughly eight thousand members, and other groups to form the City Wide Tenant Council. This popular front organization boasted a politically and demographically diverse membership that worked alongside (or as sometimes happened, antagonized) larger political bodies, ranging from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations to local, state, and national elected officials.
Though the City Wide would eventually succumb to the Red Scare, losing energy as it sought to move closer to big labor unions and local Democrats, organizing in Knickerbocker Village continued. When in 1947 the French Company tried to raise the rent by 12 percent and evict wealthier tenants whose rising incomes now exceeded previously set limits, tenants again threatened major strikes to bully their landlord into submission. In 1951, they beat back plans to evict four hundred families and hike rents by 50 percent. Two decades later, French and the tenants once again squared off, this time over a proposed 20 percent rent hike. The Daily News called the struggle “the oldest established permanent battle between landlord and tenants in New York.”
These vigorous confrontations occurred in spite of seismic political shifts. Though some KVTA members were liberal reformers, the association also contained radicals. According to building lore, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Communists executed for allegedly smuggling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, conducted their activities in an eleventh-floor, three-room, $45.75-a-month apartment with views of the East River. (This same oral tradition tends to ascribe far more prominence to the members of the Bonanno crime family who resided in the complex.) By the 1950s, neither the professionals nor the radicals could count on strong support from Democratic Party officials. With or without allies, in succeeding decades, renters continued to fight for better building conditions and against deregulation. No matter the city’s broader political ebbs and flows, connected to broader movements or not, one constant has remained: Tenants at Knickerbocker Village don’t shy away from a fight.
IN THE FACE OF CHANGING political headwinds, Knickerbocker Village has managed to preserve its truculent spirit. But it may fall victim to a far more prosaic force: housing regulatory regimes. Knickerbocker Village is one of just two complexes covered by Article IV, a 1927 measure meant to spur the creation of permanently affordable housing throughout the city. By contrast, some ten thousand apartments are subject to strict rent controls that date back to World War II; more than a hundred thousand units belong to the Mitchell-Lama program, established in 1955 to promote housing for the middle class; and a million and change are classified as “affordable,” according to loose rent-stabilization laws first introduced in 1969. NYCHA, meanwhile, houses around 521,000 New Yorkers and roughly 85,000 pay their rent through Section 8 vouchers, a federal subsidy program introduced as an alternative to public housing.
The quantity and complexity of such programs in many cases belie the true strength of the protections. Regulations that cover many tenants might be weak (like Good Cause Eviction, which protects as many as three million tenants, but only to the extent of capping their yearly rent hikes at nearly 9 percent), and those covering fewer might be stronger (like rent control, a precursor to rent stabilization, which tightly limits rent hikes, but only covers about 18,000 units). Article IV is closer to the latter. Under the program, New York state sets rents to cover a development’s operational costs on a per-room basis. The landlord may propose hikes, but they must be approved by the Department of Homes and Community Renewal (HCR). In 2019, Gothamist reported that the rent for income-tested units began at $810 per month for a one-bedroom unit and $1,250 for a three-bedroom. In 2022, tenants estimated that the average rent hike for the previous decade stood at 1.33 percent per year; the building’s then-prospective owner claimed an average of 3.1 percent yearly increases over the previous twenty years.
For much of Knickerbocker Village’s history, its landlords—Fred F. French and his successors—have consistently sought to shed the affordability protections of Article IV. In the midaughts, the Cherry Green Property Corporation received permission from the HCR to exit the Article IV program, before a judge ruled that the agency lacked the authority to do so. In response, Cherry Green pushed the HCR to allow greater and greater rent increases. In 2011, it approved a 9.6 percent hike but later rejected a request for a 13 percent hike after management was found to have intentionally kept empty apartments vacant. In lieu of hiking rents, Cherry Green attempted to withdraw from the Article IV program entirely by converting to a cooperative or condominium ownership structure, but it was ultimately barred by the state from engaging in discussions with tenants about the proposal. Returning to its tactic of hiking rents, Cherry Green requested an increase of 11 percent. A local city council member diffused the tension by securing a fifty-year tax abatement (the equivalent of 90 percent of Cherry Green’s annual tax bill) in exchange for capping rent hikes at 6 percent and focusing on repairs.
As rents steadily rose, the physical fabric of Knickerbocker Village continued to deteriorate. Superstorm Sandy rocked the complex, leaving it without power and heat weeks after the rest of the city returned to normal; necessary building improvements were only made possible through a $33.5 million grant from the city’s Build It Back program. The following year, in 2013, Cherry Green rolled out a single-building pilot for new biometrics and facial recognition systems from a tech start-up headed by a former Israel Defense Forces major general. At the end of the decade, tenant pushback over expanding the technology helped spark legislative pushes to ban the practice, though these efforts ultimately came to naught.
In the face of changing political headwinds, Knickerbocker Village has managed to preserve its truculent spirit. But it may fall victim to a far more prosaic force: housing regulatory regimes.
In 2022, Cherry Green announced it was selling Knickerbocker Village to L+M Development Partners, one of the city’s largest affordable housing companies, in a deal signed off on by the HCR and the KVTA. The sale promised to keep rents low for current tenants (2.5 percent increases until at least 2069), bring in Section 8 voucher holders (whose rents are subsidized to a higher level by the federal government) for a quarter of the units in order to help fund repairs, and set higher but still income-restricted affordable rent levels for the remaining units. L+M warned that without this plan in place rents would have to rise by 8 to 12 percent for each of the next two years.
But soon a new group, Concerned Tenants of Knickerbocker Village (CTKV), primarily but not exclusively made up of Chinese residents, sprang up in opposition, worried that the higher rents paid by federal vouchers would incentivize management to push out long-term tenants. A survey sponsored by the association revealed that the majority of residents held an unfavorable opinion of the sale, and a sizable portion of them were unaware of it all. Organizers staged protests and, with the backing of local Democratic politicians, launched a legal challenge. The case was dismissed, as courts ruled tenants could not overrule an agreement between the state housing agency and the landlord; L+M’s $84.5 million purchase finally went through last year. New nonvoucher units to be filled this spring have been advertised at monthly rents between $1,333 and $2,021 for studios; $1,428 and $2,738 for one-bedrooms; and $1,714 and $3,287 for two-bedrooms. (On the listings site StreetEasy, there are currently only two apartments renting at less than $3,000 across the rest of Chinatown.)
Whispers of higher rent hikes pegged to inflation inflamed fears for elderly tenants, many of whom live on fixed incomes. It’s not difficult to see how being continually forced into a defensive position and having to react to situations that appear to be outside of one’s grasp could sour one on extant governance structures. Seeing your landlord get millions in tax breaks and then turn around and push for even greater rent hikes is an understandably infuriating experience, just as being confronted with numerous complex regulatory and funding regimes can be confusing and alienating.
Even as Article IV has preserved Knickerbocker Village’s affordability, the persistent threat of deregulation has narrowed the scope of tenant activity. During the high-water mark of housing politicization, tenants integrated into a diverse, wide-ranging movement. Today, many small groups like the CTKV operate at a remove from citywide fights. Mobilized residents within Knickerbocker Village have not been folded into the state’s major tenant union coalition, which has racked up a number of wins in Albany and at city hall in recent years. The aims of this coalition have focused primarily on strengthening rent stabilization, winning basic protections for market-rate tenants, and pushing for stronger vouchers for homeless New Yorkers—understandable, as the size of these constituencies dwarf those of renters living under Article IV. But one wonders how Knickerbocker Village’s fortunes—political and otherwise—may have played out differently had its residents more directly collaborated with the rest of the city’s diverse and progressive tenant movement. Solidarity is a two-way responsibility.
Redshifts don’t simply represent a movement away from a fixed point but an overall drop in frequency and energy. Though organized activity within Knickerbocker Village remains strong, turnout in the 2024 presidential election dropped 13 percent from four years prior. A quarter of registered voters in the complex didn’t bother to vote at all. As much as the race’s results can be seen as a rightward lurch, they can also be seen as a retreat from electoral politics entirely. The same precarity that breeds resentment and reaction can also promote pessimism about the possibility of change, full stop.
Across the rest of the country, lower income and nonwhite voters most likely to be struggling tenants broke right or disengaged from political participation altogether. Those living adjacent to homeless encampments—more ubiquitous than ever in this country’s history—are acutely aware of the increased risks they face, should their landlords’ threats to roll back tenant protections come to pass or always-teetering government support finally falter.
One wonders how Knickerbocker Village’s fortunes—political and otherwise—may have played out differently had its residents more directly collaborated with the rest of the city’s diverse and progressive tenant movement. Solidarity is a two-way responsibility.
Exact causality for political shifts can be difficult to pin down, if not impossible. The apperception of urban disorder—heavily exploited by right-wing candidates in national and local elections since 2020—has surely shaped individual political opinions. Deteriorating living conditions and threats of massive rent hikes have likely opened outlets for anger and nihilism, too. But just because these issues have been utilized to push voters to the right does not mean that those conditions must always do so. When the New York Post, for example, argues that liberal complacency on crime has driven tenants toward the party of law and order, it shouldn’t be taken as immovable fact. Rather, we on the housing left might see the current destabilization as an opportunity for building a broader coalition. Organizers possess the power to push new frames for understanding and acting upon the world and to win changes to material reality.
In the recent Democratic mayoral primary, organizations like Communities Against Anti-Asian Violence made a concerted effort to turn out the vote in Chinatown for socialist assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. They channeled the frustrations of working-class tenants toward their respective dwellings into a compelling narrative, with promising results. District 65016 voted for moderate former-Governor Andrew Cuomo, but only by one vote more than Mamdani and former comptroller Brad Lander combined. The district containing the other half of Knickerbocker Village (as well as several other buildings in the vicinity) went to Mamdani by eighteen votes.
Redshifting is the base state of our ever-expanding universe, driving celestial bodies further and further apart. But politically, it’s not a foregone conclusion. Knickerbocker Village’s record of democratic governance suggests that simply voting blue harder won’t resolve chronic housing issues. But history suggests an increase in scope and scale of organizing can. If tenants elsewhere can forge ties with those in Knickerbocker Village, perhaps something as seemingly fundamental as the gravity of the universe can change directions.