by Reverend Adolphus C. Lacey, PhD, Bethany Baptist Church of Brooklyn, New York
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is expected to bring over 1 million visitors to the NY/NJ region and billions in economic activity. A global wealth event. In most cities, that means a surge in short-term rentals. A moment where everyday homeowners can generate real income. A once-in-a-generation opportunity for middle-class families to get ahead or at least stay afloat.
- Advertisement -
But not in New York.
Because in this city, policy has effectively locked homeowners out of the very market that would allow them to participate. So, what happens instead? Prices will rise. Demand will surge. But New York homeowners won’t benefit. The money will flow across the river into New Jersey and into surrounding suburbs. Into places where residents are actually allowed to monetize what they own.
And the loss won’t just be economic. It will be inequitable.
Because the burden doesn’t fall evenly. It falls hardest on Black and Brown homeowners in the outer boroughs, families more likely to rely on supplemental income, families whose primary asset is their home, families in neighborhoods without hotels, where short-term rentals were the only real access point to tourism dollars. In New York, they are being blocked from monetizing their greatest asset at the exact moment it matters most.
That is not just policy. That is exclusion. The war on homeowners that is falling hardest on Black and Brown families must end in this city.
For years, we’ve been fed the language of affordability. We’ve heard the speeches. We’ve marched through the slogans. But when do the words become works? When do the people who kept this city afloat: the homeowners in the outer boroughs, the backbone of our neighborhoods, finally see relief?
Because while the rhetoric rises, so do the foreclosures.
While promises are made, the cost of living keeps climbing.
And now, under the banner of “reform,” we are being asked to accept policies that don’t just miss the mark… they strike the very people who fought the hardest just to have a piece of this city to call their own.
These are parents and grandparents who scraped together down payments when banks shut their doors. Families who survived redlining, predatory lending, and decades of disinvestment—only to now be told that what they’ve built is somehow too much to keep.
And just as they reach a place where they can pass something on, here comes the conversation about how to take it away. If you think the exodus has been real so far, you haven’t seen anything yet. Over 200,000 Black New Yorkers have already left this city.
And still, every election cycle, we hear the same concern about displacement. But when it comes time to protect homeowners, the very people rooted in these communities, the conversation grows quiet… or worse, dismissive.
Let us be clear.
Renters matter. They deserve protection. But you cannot build a city on the assumption that no one owns and then act surprised when the people who do feel invisible… until it’s time to extract from them.
Because here is the deeper injustice: At the very moment homeowners are being asked to carry more: more taxes, more pressure, more uncertainty: they are denied the ability to use their own home to stay afloat.
New York cannot call itself diverse. Cannot call itself progressive. While it steadily prices out the very people who built its culture, sustained its neighborhoods, and carried this city through its hardest moments.
Homeowners are not a talking point. They are the foundation. And we need policies that allow families to keep what they’ve earned, protect what they’ve built, and pass on what they’ve saved.
