Dress it up however you like, the still dominant “it’s ours, not yours” mindset reflects and encourages a New York still mired in the dead ends of separation and exclusion.
July 22, 2026 – When, early in June, I saw that Jennifer Lopez had ignited a debate about what it means to be a New Yorker (her astoundingly retrograde view: “You have to be born in New York to be a New Yorker”), I was heartened by how many of my fellow New Yorkers said, “That’s crazy.”
The storms that have raged more recently about the Mamdani administration’s “ethnic enclave” map and about whether DSA is “taking over” neighborhoods have been quite sobering, however – and not because I have a favorite ethnic enclave that wasn’t listed or because I’m sanguine about a variety of cartoon-character positions that DSA has taken.
What’s depressing is how widely “enclaves” are accepted as a natural feature of our geographic landscape, not historically made phenomena. Those enclaves are not a requisite to celebrating ethnic pride or immigrant heritage; rather, they are the most visible signpost of segregation and of a deeply constrained sense of what residential “choice” means.
Missing the point
It was easy to get distracted as the debates intensified. Was it a Mayor Adams enclave map or a Mayor Mamdani enclave map? (While the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs has had available, since 2023, a set of posters – its “Immigrant Enclave Illustration Series” – there is no evidence to contradict the reporting in the New York Post that the map first became available during the current administration, adding only a handful of enclaves — “Little Egypt,” “Little Palestine” and “Little Senegal — to the base of enclaves that the Adams administration had previously identified.)
Was Little Italy properly excluded? Italian American Civil Rights League: “Zohran Mamdani wants to ERASE Italian Americans.” Jordan Weissman: “Little Italy is a tourist destination not an enclave, it was right not to include it.”
Mamdani as a practitioner of ethnic politics? Trip Yang: “No mayor in modern history was a better encapsulation of old-school ethnic politics than Eric Adams in his prime … Zohran Mamdani is the complete opposite.” Michael Lange: “I don’t think Zohran Mamdani is the opposite, his outreach to South Asian & Muslim voters was quintessential NYC politics.”
In the end, though, virtually everyone romanticizes (“embraces”) the enclaves. The Mayor is no exception: “It’s clearly not an exhaustive list of the more than 200 ethnic communities that call our city home, and we’re going to be making additional changes in the future to reflect that and that includes adding Little Italy to the map.”
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone (or virtually anyone) that ethnic enclaves may not be a terribly good sign of healthy co-existence and interaction. Enclaves very readily lend themselves to the “it’s ours” mentality, meaning that, when others seek to join the neighborhood, there are barriers (including traditional housing discrimination) that stand in the way. (New York is genuinely diverse in an unfortunate sense: depending on the neighborhood, the ethnic or racial identity of the discriminator varies dramatically.)
And, especially for newer New Yorkers, the assumption is that an enclave provides necessary social networking and support, when, in fact, enclaves are the laziest means of achieving those ends. Mightn’t there be others that don’t require geographic proximity?
They’re invading, they’re different, they’re bad
The same sort of problem that has plagued the enclaves discussion has also warped the debate over the role of DSA.
It would have been useful to hear critiques of the organization on the merits. What we got instead was little more than charges than DSA is “encroaching” into neighborhoods.
For example, one Bed-Stuy resident’s complaint about DSA: “Who are you really helping? Do you really care about what’s happening locally?” She intended to start a coalition “rooted in protecting the legacy of Black and Latino voters.”
New York State Attorney General Tish James characterized some of the DSA candidates Mamdani supported as not understanding “the politics of New York City” or “the cultural differences from district to district.” They are people “who have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts and are relatively new to the body politic.”
Not many went as far as Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, Jr. (“White supremacy comes in all forms”), but Esmerelda Simmons, a long-time voting rights lawyer and activist worried bluntly that, in the reporter’s phrasing, “her work to empower Black and Latino voters to pick who represents them was being erased.” She juxtaposed the “tsunami” of DSA with “the opinions and the self-governance of the citizens in the areas that they are sweeping over.”
Longtime State Senator Kevin Parker dismissed his 2022 opponent as not having been seen “as someone who organically appeared in the neighborhood,” and critiques DSA for “gentrifying our politics.”
A different way of imagining community
New York City has been run on segregation for a very long time. The current vogue is to treat much of it (the segregation that isn’t White, non-Hispanic driven) as at least benign, if not actively beneficial. Loathsome anti-immigrant rhetoric is met with an equally caricatured version of immigrants (more commonly rendered “immigrant communities”) as supermen and women who “built the city.”
There’s a different approach, one more inclusive and productive.
Step 1: Start seeing both newcomers and incumbents as people, not props. Enough with the demonizing and romanticizing.
Step 2: Start recognizing that a synonym for “newcomers” is “new neighbors.”
Step 3: Start recognizing that people within an immigrant or ethnic views are generally heterodox in their views.
Step 4: Start appreciating that, rather than using race or ethnicity as a proxy, a better way of defining a community of interest is to do literally that. Identify an interest (whether it’s affordable housing or quality education or something else) and see how that attracts a community that crosses boundaries of geography, race, and ethnicity.
I had occasion to have litigated a lawsuit against New York City over its segregation-perpetuating outsider-restriction policy in its affordable housing lotteries (what the city calls “community preference”). The suit resulted in a consent decree which reduced the percentage of units going to that preference from 50 to 20, with a further reduction to 15 percent coming. Now, more of the New Yorkers who apply for housing outside of their existing Community District – the overwhelming majority of applicants – will get their choice honored.
A less commented upon aspect of the consent decree is that Housing Connect, the lottery portal, as well as individual advertisements, is required to let New Yorkers know that “New York City is committed to the principle of inclusivity in all of its neighborhoods, including supporting New Yorkers to reside in neighborhoods of their choice, regardless of their neighborhood of origin and regardless of the neighborhood into which they want to move.”
That message of inclusivity needs to become much more a part of the politics of New York City. I know it sounds like “a throwback to the sixties,” but I’m sticking with it.
It’s not a bad place to be. As the late Congressman John Lewis said: “[I]f you’re going to create the Kingdom, you’ve got to create the Beloved Community. You’ve got to create a community at peace with itself. When you forget about race and color and see people as people, as human beings, as sisters and brothers, as part of the wholeness of humanity.” The identitarian vision reifies boundaries; the civil rights vision dissolves them.