“We don’t call it Bed-Stuy anymore,” Anthony Rogers-Wright, a lawyer and urban planner from New York City, said, referring to one of the nation’s most historic Black neighborhoods.
“We call it ‘Brad-Stuy’ because of the amount of Black folk who have been pushed out in favor of white people.”
The bitter joke underscores how America’s largest city has failed its Black residents.
Approaching one year in office, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has pledged to confront the largest issue facing generational Black New Yorkers by addressing the governmental practices that have contributed to over 170,000 Black people disappearing from New York since 2010.
“We don’t want to be an administration that presides over what has effectively become a reverse Great Migration,” he said in July. “We want to be the administration that brings that to an end.”
Now, in an attempt to codify some of his racial equity commitments, his administration is moving to mandate agencies to account for racial inequality, according to administration materials first shared with Capital B.
The new budget policy requires that city agencies explain how new or expanded programs and projects align with the city’s racial equity and climate goals when requesting funding.
The requirement could connect Mamdani’s promises to fight Black displacement to the decisions that determine which neighborhoods receive investment. The test is whether those explanations change who gets funded, and whether improvements help longtime residents stay.
“When we released the City’s first-ever Racial Equity Plan, we made a commitment to confront the inequality and injustice that have been allowed to persist in New York,” said Mayor Mamdani in a statement to Capital B. “This screening tool is another step toward making good on that promise. It will help ensure that equity is not an afterthought, but a standard that guides how government makes decisions and delivers.”
By requiring agencies to explain who would benefit from proposed spending, the city could steer housing, transportation, and climate investments toward the most struggling communities.
In New York City, the average Black resident has $2,800 in wealth and assets. The average white resident has $320,000.
Mamdani was elected last November in part due to his focus on racial equity, lowering the wealth gap, and combatting displacement amongst Black New Yorkers. Roughly 55% of Black voters cast their ballot for him.
According to the most recent polling, Black support for him has only increased. About 71% of Black New Yorkers view Mamdani as “favorable,” which is the highest among major racial groups. In comparison, only 41% of white New Yorkers view him as “favorable.”
What Mamdani’s racial equity policy could mean for Black neighborhoods
In Bed-Stuy, these pressures of displacement, climate vulnerability, and spending priorities overlap.
Between 2010 and 2020, the neighborhood lost 22,000 Black people while gaining about 30,000 white people. For those Black residents trying to hold on, rising costs are a big deterrent, but so is the neighborhood’s infrastructure.
Bed-Stuy is among the neighborhoods most vulnerable to extreme heat, but at the same time, the neighborhood has among the fewest cooling centers, least green space, and lowest access to cooling technologies like air conditioning and heat pumps.
In theory, this new metric would make sure that investments related to extreme heat were then directed toward the neighborhood.
“This is a tool in a toolbox that is pretty empty right now,” Rogers-Wright said. “We should be trying to fill that toolbox as much as possible with the specific tools that will address our racial wealth and social gaps.”
But improving the quality of life for Black New Yorkers will depend on whether those assessments actually change which proposals receive money, and whether investments come with protections that help existing residents stay. In places like Atlanta and Miami, climate-related investments in Black neighborhoods have led to displacement and gentrification.
The budget tool, which is called the Equity and Climate New Need Screening Form, follows the city’s first citywide racial equity plan, released in September. Its eight goals include reducing racial disparities in housing, unemployment, transportation, and maternal health by 2034. The framework grew out of city charter changes approved by voters in 2022 before Mamdani took office.
“Our budget reflects our values, and for generations, public investments have too often reinforced racial inequities rather than addressed them,” said Afua Atta-Mensah, NYC chief equity officer and commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice. “By embedding racial equity into the New Needs process, we are ensuring investment decisions consider the potential equitable impact of City dollars on the communities that have historically been left behind.”
The framework’s climate focus comes as, nationally, both Democrat and Republican leaders have increasingly backed away from prioritizing climate policy.
Under the Biden administration, climate policy made up about 15% of policy releases by Democratic congressional officials, but since 2025, that number has dropped to around 2%, according to an Inside Climate News analysis.
Some party leaders see that as a necessary political move as climate issues have been surpassed by everyday affordability issues, but others warn that silence weakens the case for addressing the issue.
New York’s approach suggests those choices need not be mutually exclusive. Mamdani’s administration has already framed climate investments around immediate benefits, including heat pumps in affordable housing and solar panels on schools. Those investments, for example, cut pollution while helping lower the cost of electricity.
“The history of the environmental justice movement has shown that racial injustice and environmental and climate issues are inextricably linked,” Abre’ Conner, the NAACP’s climate and environmental justice director, told Capital B. “New York City’s administration is recognizing that equity cannot be an afterthought in policymaking or budgeting — it must be considered from the start.”
Will NYC’s racial equity assessments change who gets funding?
The effort echoes a central ambition of former President Joe Biden’s Justice40 initiative.
Justice40 set a goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities. It did not guarantee those communities 40% of every program’s dollars, nor did it itself create a pot of money for funding.
Its achievements included changing agency practices, including pushing federal agencies to outline how programs would benefit communities along racial and economic lines.
The Government Accountability Office found that agencies did in fact modify programs and addressed barriers to accessing federal funding. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture outlined over 700 grants to farmers and communities considered disadvantaged under Justice40.
Yet, it remained difficult to show lasting improvements for communities. The accountability office found major gaps in implementation. In some environmental cleanup programs, the Environmental Protection Agency overestimated the projected benefits to communities and then could not deliver. Then, President Donald Trump terminated Justice40 in January 2025.
New York now faces a similar test on a smaller scale.
“This is an important step toward ensuring investments address historical and ongoing injustice, and a model we hope to see replicated moving forward,” Conner said.
Still, the city must explain whether completed assessments will be public and who can challenge an agency’s conclusions, advocates said.
Politically, the opportunity is to make climate action and racial equity tangible.
“The climate crisis and affordability crisis is hitting Black and brown folk first and worst,” Rogers-Wright said. “We of course know that it’s not going to be one city policy that is going to erase a legacy of racism and white supremacy, but we have to exhaust every legal opportunity for Black folk.”
Read More: From Watts to D.C.: How 500 Black Neighborhoods Vanished in 45 Years
