David Schneiderman, an editor turned publisher turned chief executive of The Village Voice, the granddaddy of alternative newspapers, whose 28-year tenure ran from its era of downtown-bestriding indispensability to a long, slow fade in the internet era, died on Friday in Edmonds, Wash., near Seattle. He was 77.

His daughter, Kate Schneiderman, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was pneumonia brought on by chronic lymphocytic leukemia, with which he was diagnosed two years ago. He lived in Woodway, Wash.

After being named editor in chief in 1978, Mr. Schneiderman elevated The Voice’s journalistic game, diversified a newsroom that was nearly all white and all male, and reckoned with an increasingly competitive landscape in which traditional newspapers and magazines imitated The Voice’s cutting-edge cultural and media coverage, as well as its insouciant tone.

His own hiring by Rupert Murdoch, who bought The Voice in 1977, added a chapter to the paper’s famous anti-establishment culture.

The staff vowed in a statement to refuse to work “for any new editor imposed on us in secret and without warning by the management.” Mr. Schneiderman could not take up his job for months until his predecessor’s contract expired. The staff backed down from its threat.

He entered the faction-ridden newsroom on 11th Street and University Place, where journalists defended their right to inject opinion into their copy and to refuse editing, as a coat-and-tie-wearing former editor of The New York Times, a favorite Voice foil.

He brought an easygoing, slightly bemused temperament that defused tensions; more important, he had a commitment to strong journalism.

“People fairly quickly found out that he was not what we had sort of stereotypically assumed he’d be, coming from The Times, and that he actually had a lot of good ideas and was a serious person and really good journalist,” Joe Conason, a Voice investigative reporter in the 1980s, said in an interview.

Mr. Schneiderman enhanced The Voice’s commitment to reporting. He hired Wayne Barrett, who investigated a real estate developer few took seriously, Donald J. Trump, and Teresa Carpenter, a crime reporter who in 1981 won The Voice its first Pulitzer Prize. He also fended off Mr. Murdoch, who wanted Mr. Conason’s wings clipped for writing critically and regularly about him.

“There was a layer of professionalism that got brought into The Voice that some of the people from the ’60s and ’70s didn’t like,” Tricia Romano, a former Voice writer who last year published an oral history of the paper, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” said in an interview.

“He was very good at just connecting with people and navigating all the craziness,” she added.

Mr. Schneiderman’s agenda included diversifying The Voice. He named women as senior editors and made the paper a launchpad for young Black writers: He supported giving the music and culture critic Stanley Crouch a column and hired the writer Thulani Davis (later an opera librettist). Under him, the paper printed its first gay pride issue in 1979.

Mr. Schneiderman also fired Alexander Cockburn, a strong critic of Israel, for accepting $10,000 from the Institute of Arab Studies, a research group, for a book on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Mr. Cockburn, he said, had “damaged the credibility” of The Voice.

Under a new owner, Leonard N. Stern, a pet food and real estate mogul who bought The Voice in 1985, Mr. Schneiderman ascended to the job of publisher. He appointed Karen Durbin, a former arts editor, as the paper’s second woman editor in chief in 1994, a decision that aggravated the divide between hard-news reporters and cultural writers. Mr. Barrett, according to the oral history, wore a dress to the office the week Ms. Durbin took over.

Mr. Schneiderman pushed the paper to grow beyond its countercultural heritage and strident left-wing politics as its core readership grew older and more prosperous. Many on the staff — influential critics and columnists, who embraced the view that inmates should run the asylum — pulled in the opposite direction, fearful that The Voice would lose its edge.

In 1988 Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. Stern launched a tabloid weekly, 7 Days, an uptown alter ego to The Voice, with entertainment listings and deftly written takes on New York trends and scenes. It was a buzzy success, but two years later it ended its run for lack of advertising.

Competition from other New York weeklies with entertainment listings, including Time Out New York, ate into The Voice’s circulation even as traditional publications, including The Times’s arts and style sections, swiped pieces of its downtown DNA.

Moribund circulation and revenues at The Voice led to a once-unthinkable move: The $1.25 newsstand price was eliminated, and the paper became free in 1996.

“One of the negative aspects of The Voice over the past few years is that it has sort of self-ghettoized itself and lost a generation of readers,” Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who contributed to the paper beginning in the 1950s, told The Times in 1996.

Moving to a giveaway model was a boon to circulation, which had more than doubled to 250,000 by 1999, and the paper said the increased advertising more than made up for lost revenue.

Mr. Stern — with input from Mr. Schneiderman, who was named president of Mr. Stern’s VV Publishing Corporation in 1988 — acquired other alternative papers, first L.A. Weekly in 1994 and later papers in Seattle, Nashville and the Twin Cities.

But with the advent of Craigslist, the free online portal for classified ads — the source of half The Voice’s revenue — Mr. Stern saw the writing on the wall and abruptly decided to sell.

“The minute Craigslist came to the city, literally within a few weeks, our ads — it was slow. Then it stopped growing and it never grew again,” Mr. Schneiderman told Ms. Romano for her oral history.

In 2000, the seven-paper chain, including the flagship Voice, was bought by a group of investors. They installed Mr. Schneiderman as chief executive, with a small equity stake, in a new company, Village Voice Media.

The company merged in 2005 with the New Times Group, a rival chain of alt-weeklies that Mr. Schneiderman had once disparaged for slashing staff at papers it acquired. Mr. Schneiderman was put in charge of exploring online opportunities for New Times. But he resigned a year later.

“I remember sitting in a meeting in my conference room, and I was suddenly inconsequential,” he was quoted as saying in the oral history. “I was like a potted plant.”

David Abbot Schneiderman was born on April 14, 1947, in Manhattan, the younger of two sons of Robert D. Schneiderman and Mary (Torres) Schneiderman. His father was a children’s wear salesman who later retired from the Izod company. His mother was an executive assistant at J.C. Penney. David grew up in the Long Island suburbs of Hewlett and Roslyn.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 1969 and a master’s degree in international studies in 1970 from Johns Hopkins University.

He was hired by The Times that year as an assistant editor on the newly created Op-Ed page, a collection of opinion columns that ran opposite the editorials.

His marriage to Peggy Rosenthal ended in divorce. In 2006 he married Dana Faust, the managing director of advertising for The Times at its Seattle sales office.

She and Ms. Schneiderman, his daughter from his first marriage, survive him, as do a stepson, Benjamin Drachler; a stepdaughter, Madeline Drachler; four grandchildren; and his brother, Stuart Schneiderman.

After resigning from The Voice, Mr. Schneiderman commuted from his home near Seattle to San Francisco, where he was an executive of a corporate communications firm, Abernathy MacGregor Group (now H/Advisors Abernathy). He retired in 2016.

Two years later, The Voice, which had ceased publishing in print and appeared only online, went out of business in its 63rd year. Its full-time staff by that time had shrunk to a mere 18 people.

“Newmark did destroy newspapers,” Mr. Schneiderman said of Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, in the oral history. “There’s no two ways about it.”

A day after Mayor Eric Adams visited President-elect Donald J. Trump in Florida, his lawyer filed court papers in the mayor’s federal corruption case arguing that the former prosecutor who brought the case was trying to advance his own political career.

The lawyer, Alex Spiro, wrote a letter on Saturday to the judge overseeing the case, arguing that a recent opinion article by the former prosecutor, Damian Williams, could prejudice the jury pool against Mr. Adams and was part of Mr. Williams’s plan to run for mayor or another political office.

“The conclusion here is inevitable,” Mr. Spiro said. “Mr. Williams brought a meritless case against a political rival to bolster his own immediate candidacy for office, potentially including mayor of New York.”

Mr. Williams announced the indictment against Mr. Adams in September, when he was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York; he resigned in mid-December. He argued in the opinion article, published last week in City & State, that the city was in “deep crisis” and was “being led with a broken ethical compass.”

The piece did not directly mention the prosecution of Mr. Adams. But its publication, along with a new website highlighting Mr. Williams’s achievements, got New York’s political world buzzing, with some wondering whether he might run for office, most likely governor.

Mr. Williams did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the Southern District, declined to comment.

Mr. Adams, a Democrat, is running for a second term in a competitive primary in June. He is set to go on trial in April on charges of bribery and fraud. He has insisted that he is innocent and has pleaded not guilty.

Mr. Trump has said that he is considering offering a pardon to Mr. Adams, arguing that both he and the mayor were “persecuted” by prosectors. The two men had lunch at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach on Friday; Mr. Adams said they did not discuss his legal case.

Mr. Spiro asked the judge to consider Mr. Williams’s actions as part of the mayor’s efforts to have the case dismissed, and he called for the Department of Justice to open an investigation into whether the mayor’s prosecution had been brought for improper purposes.

Mr. Spiro argued that the “taint on the jury pool is irrevocable” and that Mr. Williams had “smeared Mayor Adams’s reputation for his own political benefit.”

Mr. Williams served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District from 2021 to 2024 and oversaw many prominent cases, including prosecutions against the former New Jersey senator Robert Menendez and the rapper Sean Combs. Before he was appointed to the post by President Biden, he served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the office for nine years, leading the securities fraud unit for part of that time. He announced recently that he would join the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison as a partner in the litigation department.

Mr. Trump has picked Jay Clayton, the top Wall Street enforcer during his first administration, to replace Mr. Williams. Mr. Clayton still must be confirmed by the Senate.

Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

For decades now, progress in solving New York’s housing crisis has stagnated amid the contest between two dominant visions: one that would have the city build up and up and up as if it were Hong Kong, and another that would privilege intimate scale — in some parts of the city meaning the charming traditions of European urbanism and in other parts, farther from the center, meaning the traditions of Levittown. Binary solutions nearly always present a trap. But last month the city took a historic step toward breaking out of it. After 175 community board meetings and two public hearings, each of which unfolded over nearly 15 hours, the City Council passed the most extensive set of zoning changes in more than 60 years.

The Zoning Resolution of 1961 radically altered the contours of the city in a way that was described in one academic analysis as reflecting “a disdain for the existing built form.” Famously labyrinthine, the codes, in the simplest understanding, prioritized high-rise office buildings over housing as the city’s population went into decline. The new rules — packaged as City of Yes for Housing Opportunity — roll back arcane restrictions that have long stifled housing supply in an era of staggering demand, and they have come about largely under the radar of New Yorkers, a vast majority of whom do not immerse themselves in the wonkier corners of planning and policy.

City of Yes does not — and isn’t intended to — resolutely end the city’s housing emergencies, which policymakers have estimated would require 500,000 additional units of housing. But it represents a vital new approach, one that shifts the focus away from the current paradigm, where the answer seems to consistently and tenaciously lie in building glass towers in high-density neighborhoods in Manhattan, northern Brooklyn or the waterfront in Queens and making some percentage of them “affordable,” a term subject to multiple interpretations. Again and again, this model tends to invite fierce community opposition — as it has with proposed projects across from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and in Gowanus — that plays out over years and mountains of litigation.

The guiding principle behind City of Yes is to distribute the responsibility of creating housing more evenly, essentially extending it to every neighborhood in the city. Say you are a homeowner with an underused backyard. Under certain conditions, you can now build or repurpose a structure of up to 800 square feet to rent out long term (Airbnb use is not approved) or generously hand over to your aging parents. The crux of the plan, though, is an emphasis on modest structures of five or six stories rather than 30.

This is meant to address what urban planners characterize as “the missing middle,” the void of a certain housing style that cities across the country are now trying to fill. Zoning changes do not mandate where and how much housing ought to be built; they open up (or foreclose) possibility. In this case, they unlock a catalog of opportunities to facilitate development; converting office buildings to apartment buildings around the city, long suggested as a way to create housing, now has a much easier path.

According to the calculations of the city’s planning department, City of Yes will create more homes accessible to those at lower income levels over the next 15 years than all of the city’s other inclusionary housing programs since they first came into being in the mid-1980s. The plan further incentivizes development of all types of housing by relaxing — and in some places eliminating — the expensive requirement that a certain number of parking spaces be allotted for new apartment complexes. It is a requirement that urban planners and ordinary car antagonists have complained about for decades.

In all, City of Yes is expected to produce 80,000 new units of housing, which might seem unimpressive, given the need. But this amounts to many, many more homes than previous amendments to the zoning code have produced. This goal is to be met in part with the help of a new, state-sponsored tax incentive and a $5 billion contribution of additional city and state funds, for which the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, fought vigorously.

“City of Yes highlighted what municipal-led initiatives can achieve,” said Annemarie Gray, who used to work in planning and housing policy for the city under the de Blasio and Adams administrations and now serves as the executive director of Open New York, a nonprofit that supports housing expansion. But what is necessary going forward, in her view, are aggressive measures taken at the level of the governor’s office and the State Legislature. Some of this would involve changing certain zoning codes outside the city, especially near commuter rail lines, to accommodate apartment buildings.

Despite the obvious need, recent efforts to increase housing density in New York’s commuter suburbs have failed. Assemblyman Robert Carroll, who represents Park Slope and other adjacent Brooklyn neighborhoods, told me that “during the last two years, we have been unable to convince a single suburban county to build more housing.”

Recently, Mr. Carroll has taken the side of “the missing middle” for a site in Windsor Terrace, in his district, where the Arrow Linen and Uniform Supply Company has stood since 1947. In conjunction with a developer, the longtime owner would like to turn it into a 13-story apartment complex, in a plan ginned up well before City of Yes was passed. Mr. Carroll and many members of the community are pushing for something closer to seven or nine stories with more affordable units than have been proposed.

In an article in City Limits last year, Zellnor Myrie, a state senator who has since announced a run for mayor, wrote that between 2010 and 2020, parts of his district, which includes lower-income neighborhoods in Central Brooklyn, added 7,400 new housing units, while in Windsor Terrace, that figure stood at 268. In six of those years, he wrote, the neighborhood actually suffered a net loss of housing.

What is striking about the debate, no matter how contentious, is the shape it has taken and that such a message has really resonated. “The push to build housing in neighborhoods that haven’t is very strong,” Shahana Hanif, the local councilwoman for Windsor Terrace, who now has the most significant say in the fate of the project, told me. Many people who live in the neighborhood, which has plenty of single-family houses owned by gentrifiers, have argued for a development entirely made up of affordable apartments. The tension has not been between those who want all and those who want nothing.