NEW YORK — On one of the coldest mornings of the year, David K. Brawley stood on the roof of a new home for seniors he had helped create, his coat fluttering in the wind. He surveyed his domain.
He pointed to the left, toward the hazy outline of the Manhattan skyline, to the rows of rental apartments below that he had helped develop. He pointed to the right, toward Jamaica Bay, to the mall and the row houses, built on top of landfill and overgrown fields, whose construction he had championed.
Squint, and you could almost see it: his vision of 10,000 more apartments, in new buildings stretching into every undeveloped corner of a neighborhood once known as the murder capital of New York City…