Two events this week — the sale of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town and a series of community board hearings about Aby Rosen’s proposal to build a new tower on the Upper East Side — cast into sharp relief the way New Yorkers are faced with decisions about what their metropolis will look like in the future. By our lights the question boils down to how to chart a course between Hong Kong and Paris. The French capital has preserved its history to the detriment of its future, while Hong Kong has looked so far forward that it has suffered in the cultural sense. We have the sense that neither extreme is right for New York.

The announced sale of Peter Cooper and Stuyvesant Town to Tishman Speyer for a record-setting $5.4 billion caps nearly two months of intense bidding and politicking. Even as the private-sector auction was underway, Senator Schumer and other politicians were, demagogically, taking up the cause of allegedly aggrieved tenants who represented they were worried the sale would mark an end of an era of middle class affordability in Manhattan. Such was never a credible fear. The large number of apartment units in the developments that are still rent stabilized — about 70% by most counts — will be stabilized even after the ink on the sale is dry, though there may well be litigation over all this for years.

The main fear being voiced is that a new owner would expand on efforts by the seller, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, to ensure that only tenants who are legally entitled to stabilization benefit from the artificially reduced rents. For example, Met Life had installed a new electronic card-key access system in an effort to crack down on illegal subletting. As we remarked in an editorial while the process was unfolding, the precise extent to which the development is a middle-class haven has been overstated. Peter Cooper and Stuyvesant Town are not the middle class areas they were four decades ago, because many people who were members of the middle class 40 years ago have moved up in the world.

Yet some New Yorkers were happy to wave the flag of an antiquated vision of the development in an effort to stop a private sale from going forward. Mr. Schumer even proposed forcing New Yorkers to pay tax money into a quixotic tenant-buyout proposal. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn also opposed the sale by Met Life. Ultimately those efforts went nowhere. So in this sense at least, the newly announced sale is more than just a sign that the New York real estate dynamo is booming. It’s a sign that the future has a place in the city. True, rent stabilization will continue there for the foreseeable future, but, absent surprises in the courts, nostalgia and fear of the future aren’t being allowed to combine to thwart the deal.

A proposed real estate development on the Upper East Side will bring the issue even more clearly into focus. Mr. Rosen proposes building an apartment tower designed by Lord Foster atop the Parke-Bernet gallery building on Madison Avenue. He is already running into opposition from neighbors and historic preservationists who decry his plans for a site in the Upper East Side historic district that stretches from 59th Street to 78th Street. Opponents argue that preserving neighborhoods, as opposed to just individual buildings, protects historical context, though if the preservationists really believed that, they would have bought the rights to build.

In any event, to what extent is landmarking to hold sway? Surely part of New York’s overall historical context is its willingness to welcome innovative new growth, its capacity for transformation. While no one wants New York to become like Hong Kong, a city so rabidly modern that it has too often sublimated its history, the solution isn’t to transform Manhattan into Paris instead, a city so self-satisfied with the glories of its past that it has relegated itself to a miserable future and all growth to the suburbs. We carry no particular brief for Mr. Rosen or his tower. But by the same token, Mr. Rosen’s opponents might want to reserve judgment. Change itself is as much a part of New York’s identity as any particular neighborhood.