Gentrification in Harlem

Both New Orleans and Harlem are seen historically as Black cultural centers in the United States. Both are world-renowned for their music and food.

What will happen to Harlem’s brownstones as gentrification sweeps north from Midtown and the Upper West Side. While many brownstones stand vacant or in severe disrepair, a great many of these beautiful buildings have been converted to SRO housing and are home to low-income single people who cannot afford “affordable” housing like that offered by the Family Preservation Center. According to the best statistics available from HPD, some 2,000 of Manhattan’s 3,800 SRO addresses are in the Harlem area covered by Community Boards 9 and 10, and these buildings include more than 28,000 SRO rooms. While many of these buildings may be dilapidated or even destroyed, Harlem’s brownstones still represent a large part of Manhattan’s affordable housing.

These buildings are clearly in the crosshairs of gentrifying real-estate developers. One index of this activity, applications for the Certificates of No Harassment that are needed to convert SRO buildings to other uses, shows that the number of applications for buildings in Harlem rose from 18 in 1996 to 60 in 1998—half the applications for Manhattan last year. The residents of 58 Edgecombe Ave. were lucky on several counts. They included among them some people who knew they had rights and couldn’t be pushed out of their home. They had concerned neighbors who called for help and kept records of what they saw. They had a City Councilmember whose staff reacted quickly and worked hard for the tenants’ interests. And they were able to get free legal help from the West Side SRO Law Project. But, as the waves of gentrification sweep over them, most low-income residents of Harlem’s SROs will fall through the cracks unless care is taken to protect them from real-estate speculators like the shell companies in Mineola, or from nonprofit developers like the Family Preservation Center.

All in all, it can be seen that Gentrification is good for those who are econically well to do and bad for those on the lower economic ladder. There is a spatial arrangement of buildings and places of business that attracts people and show the use of and expansion of the economy. On the roads there is resurfacing work and other actions to aid transportation. With all of this work being done there are things and places of different values; use value and exchange, to attract and help people become more aware of what Harlem has to offer. The growth machine in Harlem is on in full force and has become a force to be reckoned with. There are politicians abound which bring the media and there are different companies and services offered which people happen to need. It is also a place of the arts, home of the famous Harlem Renaissance, with places of artistic interest such as museums and theatres among which the most famous may be the Apollo. All of these things have shown that Harlem is a center for gentrification whether it is good or bad.

BIBILIOGRAPHY

Gale, Dennis E. Neighborhood Revitalization and the Postindustrial City: A Multinational Perspective. Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books. 1984.
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Poverty Concentration Measures and the Urban Underclass Journal article by Richard Greene; Economic Geography, Vol. 67, 1991
The New Harlem, Who’s Behind the Real Estate Gold Rush and Who’s Fighting It? by Rivka Gewirtz Little, September 18 – 24, 2002
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Mele, Christopher. Selling the Lower East Side. Univ of Minnesota, 2000. ISBN 0-8166-3182-4
Lloyd, Richard. Neo-Bohemia. Routledge, 2006. ISBN 0-415-95182-8
Community fights gentrification in Harlem, By Imani Henry ,Published Dec 4, 2005
Harlem’s Gentrification and Its Discontents By Frank Brodhead
tenant.net