The mayor visited a public housing complex in Brooklyn as he tries to pitch residents a plan for new development on the city-owned land. NY1's Courtney Gross filed the following report.

They lined up down the sidewalk and went through security for an unusual guest.

Mayor Bill de Blasio held his first public forum with residents of a Brooklyn housing development called Wyckoff Gardens. It's one of two developments where his administration has proposed to build some market-rate development on underutilized property. The development would be 50 percent affordable housing and 50 percent market rate.

"We will protect it and we will never privatize it. We must protect it for the long term," de Blasio said.

Not surprisingly, the proposal was met with skepticism from these residents.

"Just because you say you are raising money to take care of our needs, you got to take care of our needs currently," said one resident.

"It seems like, Mayor de Blasio, you are still creating two cities. NYCHA will be two cities," said another. "You have a luxurious building for the new people coming in and us dealing with the amenities that we have."

"There are a lot of things that aren't factually true, and I have to delineate that," de Blasio said.

Put on the defensive, the mayor argued the development is needed to save the housing authority, which has struggled financially for years. Many developments have fallen into disrepair. By his estimate, it has $17 billion in unmet capital needs.

"Can you tell us just off the top of the head some of the sacrifices we would have to make as residents?" one resident asked the mayor.

In response, the mayor said, "The sacrifice is that there will be some kind of change. There will be a transition as things are being built."

Clearly, at the end of the night, after the mayor took questions for about two hours, there were no hard feelings. He posed for a few selfies.

"Residents have really important questions, really blunt questions, exactly, that they had a right to get answers to," he said.

The housing authority proposals must still go through the land use approval process. So clearly, this is just the beginning of the conversation.