The public housing development of Williamsburg Houses sits on 23 acres not far from the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn—a collection of four-story buildings sprawling out over the acres at odd angles to the surrounding neighborhood grid. Built by the New York City Housing Authority in the 1930s, Williamsburg Houses was the first public housing of its kind in Brooklyn.

In 1964, when Council Member Rosie Mendez (D-Manhattan) was 11 months old, the Brooklyn tenement where she, her older brother and parents lived was destroyed by fire. Soon after, the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of 115 Scholes St., a building in the southwest corner of Williamsburg Houses. They lived there for 23 years.

The bedroom Mendez shared with her older brother faces east down Scholes St. and overlooks a park in the center of the development. Today, the tenements and storefronts on the street and surrounding avenues are huddled between luxury condominiums and office buildings in various states of completion. Signs of change and gentrification are everywhere in the neighborhood, but the modernist brick complex of Williamsburg Houses is for the most part the same as it was 40 years ago.

“My brother and I buried our first hamster right here somewhere,” Mendez said, looking down to a patch of ground in the small courtyard outside the entrance to her old building.

When they were kids, the courtyard served as a baseball field and roller derby track, with races around the lone tree. The door to the building had no lock and children would stream in and out constantly.

“We were like a posse here, playing all the time,” Mendez recalled. “This was our domain.”

They would roam the development recruiting kids for various teams. The door accessing the roof was unlocked, affording an additional play area with a view. Later in elementary school, the children were allowed to cross the street to the park unaccompanied.

The neighborhood surrounding the housing development was largely a Latino community, but Mendez recalls the wider ethnic diversity of her building.

“I could smell the Latino food, with the rice, the beans and pork chops, and I could smell cauliflower and collared greens from our African American neighbors,” she said. “We had some Irish neighbors that were on the third floor and there were distinctive smells which now I know as corned beef and cabbage, but back then I wasn’t sure what it was.”

At night she would sit in the apartment’s kitchen window, talking for hours with a friend in her bedroom window across the way.

When the crack epidemic spread through the city in the early ’80s, the neighborhood got hit hard. Dealers were all over the streets, Mendez remembers. Syringes were all over the sidewalks and playgrounds.

“People were afraid to leave their homes,” Mendez recalled.

Two senior citizens were murdered at home in the development. By that time, there were locks on all the doors and the children no longer played on the roof.

Despite the ups and downs of the neighborhood, Mendez said she was aware from a young age that the family was lucky to be in public housing. Her mother worked for a while as a beautician and her father was an assistant at a pharmacy. Because rent in the development was capped at 30 percent of household income, the family was never in danger of missing the rent. In contrast to the surrounding community, evictions were relatively rare in Williamsburg Houses.

The condition of the apartments was a cut above as well.

“When I was growing up, all the kids who went to school with me wanted to come to my house to play and study because we didn't have rats and we didn't have roaches,” she said. “We always had heat, and they didn't always have that in their apartments.”

Her mother would often volunteer at a homeless shelter in a local Catholic Church, and Mendez would accompany her, carrying food her mother would cook for the people there. She remembers recognizing people from the surrounding community who had had homes and lost them, now living at the shelter. 

One incident had a particular effect on her as a child.

“I remember in junior high a student got evicted,” she said. “Then he wasn't doing as well in class. And after that summer when we came back to school, he just didn't come back. This was someone who had been in school with us all through elementary school and part of junior high school and then he was just gone. It was like a void. You always wondered what happened to him and his family.”

Only when she was already an undergraduate across the river at NYU did Mendez begin to fully grasp the effect growing up in public housing had had on her.

“I started reflecting on the changes that I saw growing up as a kid, and having benefited from growing up in public housing,” she said. “I really started to get what public housing was, why it was created, and the ideology behind it. And I was fascinated by it.”

After law school, Mendez went on to work for Brooklyn Legal Services on tenant and relocation issues. She got involved in government as Margarita López's chief of staff, and later won her old seat, which represents large swaths of public housing on the Lower East Side. On the Council, she now chairs the Public Housing Subcommittee.

The lessons from the old neighborhood remain with her. She started in public housing, and that, she says, is where everything starts.

“The most important thing is housing,” she said. “Once you've stabilized that, then you can work on everything else.”