Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz likes to frame his story as one of rags to riches, a classic tale.

“I’m self-made,” said Schultz on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last month. “I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, New York. I thought that was the American Dream.”

But when Sheryl Boyce, 64, hears him tell it, she cringes. Boyce and Schultz both grew up in the Bay View Houses of Brooklyn’s Canarsie neighborhood in the 1950s and ’60s. At that time, the housing development was considered the “country club” of projects, Boyce told HuffPost.

“To say he came from nothing,” said Boyce, now president of the Bay View Houses Community Association, “it is very disingenuous.”

Schultz has been publicly weighing a 2020 bid for president, releasing an autobiographical book and launching a media blitz. His Horatio Alger story has been a central part of his publicity tour, using his childhood in the projects as proof of his humble origins and exposure to diversity.

But academics, and residents like Boyce, take issue with Schultz using Bay View to describe his youth as coming from “nothing.”

A 1958 article in Progressive Architecture, as reviewed by HuffPost, called the housing development “middle-income,” saying it was designed to “alleviate the shortage” of housing for people in this wage class. The project was over 90-percent white, New York City Housing Authority documents from this time show, although Schultz has said he grew up in “in a very diverse background as a young boy in the projects” where he “didn’t see color.”

And while Schultz’s family may have struggled financially during his childhood ― he says in his memoir that his father hopped from job to job, at one point relying on a charitable organization for food ― families living in the Bay View Houses at the time were far from destitute.

In 1970, when Schultz lived there, the average family income in the area was nearly $12,000, or $70,000 in today’s dollars. Today, the median household income for this area is only $23,000, according to the census.

It was “definitely a more working, middle-class housing program,” said Nicholas Bloom, a professor of social science at the New York Institute of Technology, who has written extensively about housing in New York City. “He moved into a new, really nicely built” development.

During Schultz’s childhood, the Bay View Houses were “kind of a stepping stone to suburbs and higher-quality housing,” Bloom said.

In his book, From the Ground Up, Schultz echoes this view, providing a more nuanced version than he has in interviews, saying the housing project was “not designed to be dead ends but to jumpstart lives.”