The New York City Council on Wednesday approved Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan for rezoning East New York. Those 190 blocks of Brooklyn are the first, and largest, of 15 neighborhoods across the city where the administration intends to harness the real estate market to help achieve its ambitious 10-year goal of building or preserving 200,000 affordable apartments.

That goal might seem paradoxical or utopian, given what the administration is promising: to spur housing construction while keeping gentrification at bay and to improve neighborhoods’ amenities while preserving their character, making them more affordable and desirable and diverse and densely-built, all at the same time.

Critics of the plan, finding those ideals impossible to square, had forcefully opposed the East New York rezoning, insisting that it would only accelerate the worst kind of change — the crushing rents and tenant displacement that have transformed so many working-class blocks of Brooklyn and Queens. That fear is real and understandable, given the pace of gentrification, which is why it took courage for the Council member who represents the bulk of the neighborhood, Rafael Espinal, to endorse the administration’s plan, paving the way for its near-unanimous approval.

The city’s tools are powerful: a new mandatory inclusionary housing law that requires developers in rezoned areas to set aside up to 30 percent of units in new buildings for lower-rent apartments. That’s a minimum — the administration also plans to use subsidies and tax breaks to extract even deeper levels of affordability from new construction. In East New York, it promises to break ground in the next two years on 1,200 “deeply affordable” apartments. Forty percent of them will be rented by families earning $38,850 or less. Ten percent will be rented by families making $23,350 or less.