Hakim, Meet Hakeem: How a Young City Farmer Got to Know a Congressman

Growing up, Hakim Jeffrey did not think much about politics. But people would often point out that his name sounded very similar to the name of his representative in Congress, a rising star in the House and fellow Brooklyn native.

“All of them would just tell me, ‘You should meet this man some day,’” Mr. Jeffrey said.

He brushed it off. Mr. Jeffrey, who lived in the Bay View Houses, a public housing development in Canarsie, thought of himself then as “just a regular 16-year-old boy from the projects.”

Then, at 18, he started working on a new farm at the development, one of several the New York City Housing Authority had helped build to provide healthy food for residents.

He loved it.

Before, he had been an introvert who skipped school to play video games. On the farm, he would give important people tours, showing how he grew chard, kale, tomatoes, squash, basil and other produce.

Mr. Jeffrey, now 24, got more involved, finding purpose in helping a public housing community often overlooked by the outside world, unless a building was falling apart.

On a cloudy March afternoon last year, one of his tour participants had a familiar name. That was when Hakim Jeffrey met Hakeem Jeffries.

“‘You have the coolest name out there,’” Mr. Jeffrey recalls Mr. Jeffries telling him.

The meeting between Mr. Jeffrey and Mr. Jeffries, 53, a Brooklyn Democrat and the House minority leader, was maybe just an amusing coincidence. But Mr. Jeffrey also saw it as something a little more than that: a moment that highlighted the underappreciated potential of Brooklyn’s youth.

Civic leadership is typically the bailiwick of older people, especially in New York City’s public housing system, where nearly 43 percent of the households are headed by people 62 or