In Housing Court, Different View of New York City's Mayoral Race A chill wind pinching his face, Compton Bremner takes his place among hundreds of men and women who clutch dispossess notices and rent receipts. This is Brooklyn's Housing Court, and the line he stands in snakes out the door and down Livingston Street. There are nurses" aides and child care workers, students and waitresses and delivery men. Mr. Bremner, 56, a sturdy block of a man, works in fire safety at a hospital. He and his wife are a month behind on rent owed to their landlord, with whom they are quarreling about repairs. His wife is burying her mother in Guyana. So he's here alone. Guards herd him and 10 others onto an elevator that smells of Lysol. The doors open on the fourth floor and he steps into chaos: Tenants crowd benches; an elderly couple cries in the corner; and lawyers talk loudly into cellphones and pause occasionally to half-yell out for tenants. Mrs. Robinson? I need those receipts! An aging woman, her hair a thicket of gray, struggles to her feet and trundles over, holding her papers like holy script. Mr. Bremner speaks of his bottom line on this day: "I just have to hold on to our apartment," he says. We are working people who love this city. But we need our home. Outside, behind the New Apollo Diner and a bail bondsman's office, three gleaming condo towers rise. That isn't this world. This is hanging-by-a-shoestring New York. Bill de Blasio, the Democratic mayoral candidate, appears poised to win in a rout on Tuesday, in no small part because he talks of a city riven, with rich and poor, gilded and not so. His liberal patter has put the editorial pages of the city's tabloids in a fearful state. The New York Post ran a front page featuring a hammer and sickle, and a photograph of a smiling, presumably Red Bill. Those hyperventilations feel absurd here. Last year, in a city with more than 50,000 homeless people, landlords commenced 217,914 legal actions for nonpayment of rent. That is slightly less than the population of Newark. In that same period, real wages in New York City declined by 4.5 percent. In miles-long swaths of the South Bronx and east Brooklyn and southeast Queens, a majority of tenants pay more than 50 percent of their income for rent. It's a desperate mathematics. The point isn't to argue that every tenant or beleaguered homeowner wears a halo. Years ago, I was a tenant organizer in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and quickly came to recognize that the city's smaller landlords are only marginally less hard-pressed than tenants. And the margins for error are achingly narrow. I followed Mr. Bremner into a courtroom. It is dormouse quiet, with packed rows of tenants peering into space and folding their papers. A mother's lips move as she prays. Another woman reaches for her asthma nebulizer. Judge Michelle Schreiber, polite and attentive, quizzes a woman, Valerie, who works two jobs and is caught up in a bureaucratic snarl with her federal housing assistance. "The landlord says you owe $8,657.45," the judge says. How are you going to pay this? Valerie's frown lines cut grooves across her forehead. She confesses that the money she owes is a mountain that cannot be scaled. Next up is a former G.I. He was a medic in Afghanistan. Snipers there asked him to spot and count Afghans as they fell dead. "I hoped to have a benevolent role," he says. I decided if I survived, I would go live in the place I saw on television. New York. He owes $2,800 in back rent. The Department of Veterans Affairs might help him. He hopes so; he says his landlord is a good man. Next up is Mr. Bremner. He pays his back rent and keeps his apartment. He lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and he and his wife like their neighbors. Change is at their doorstep; they live near the Barclays Center, gentrification's lodestar. They pay $911 for a two-bedroom. Two white kids moved in down the hall and pay twice as much. He speaks of this without rancor; he says the white kids have been priced out, too. Who will he vote for? De Blasio, he says without hesitation. We love this city - order food at 3 a.m. and it shows up before you hang up the phone. His baritone laugh carries traces of his native Guyana. Mr. de Blasio can make some inroads for us. May the new mayor be worthy of Mr. Bremner's hope. Email: powellm@nytimes.com Twitter: @powellnyt An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a diner outside Brooklyn's Housing Court. It is the New Apollo Diner, not the Athens Diner.