N.Y.'s Harlem transformed by real-estate boom

NEW YORK — The woman in the black dress trots up with that bug-eyed, hello, are-you-ready-to-buy-now look so favored by real-estate brokers in Gold Rush Harlem.

"I'll show you this beautiful place in two minutes!" She's momentarily mistaken a reporter for her customer. "These two men" — she nods at two older gentlemen standing in the doorway — "are going to be leaving tonight."

That's not really true. Samuel Ragland, 80, and Eugene Norwood, 65, have rented single rooms on the top floor of this broken-down and now-unheated brownstone on 120th Street for two decades and have a court order prohibiting their eviction. But that doesn't mean they won't be departing next week or the week after.

"We haven't had heat or water in two weeks, and they want us out," said Ragland, a soft-spoken Army veteran and retired truck driver. "I expect we'll leave soon enough."

Prices jump

The transformation of this historic capital of Black America has taken an amphetamined step or three beyond a Starbucks, a Body Shop and former President Clinton's office on 125th Street.

Officials have broken ground on a 204-room Courtyard by Marriott. And housing prices have soared into the stratosphere, threatening to leave behind thousands of Harlem's poorest.

Four years ago, the advent of the $400,000 brownstone in central Harlem was met with whoops of disbelief. Today, the average brownstone shell in central Harlem sells for $1.1 million, and median sale prices of co-ops and condos have jumped to $309,000 from $60,000 in 1995.

Over near Eighth Avenue, known to a generation of junkies and hipsters as Heroin Alley, a banner hangs off the side of a freshly refurbished apartment building at 117th Street, advertising "Luxury Condos." The two-bath, two-bedroom condos retail at $1.6 million and feature stainless steel kitchens with Miele dishwashers and Brazilian cherrywood floors. The wood-burning fireplaces are optional.

"Things have gotten a little out of hand, yes, they have," said James Lewis, a tenant organizer and Harlem resident. "I love all the great things. But so many people endured the bad times and can't afford the good."

Such is the conundrum facing those who labored to save Harlem in the decades when AIDS, bank disinvestment, crack cocaine and crime descended like locusts. In those dark days, city officials, beginning with then-Mayor Edward Koch, invested $1.4 billion over 15 years to rebuild Harlem. Together with community leaders, they rehabilitated 41,000 affordable and often handsome apartments, which house 200,000 people.

Developers continue to build affordable housing; at least three such towers are under construction in Harlem today. Developers rent or sell some units at market rates while using profits to subsidize apartments for working and middle-class residents.

But a real-estate market on steroids threatens this strategy. Lately, private developers have outbid nonprofit groups for land. In a neighborhood where the median family income is $24,000 — half the citywide median — disorientation attends.

"It's happened so quick, like a gold rush," said Sheena Wright of Abyssinian Development, which has developed thousands of units of affordable housing. "The city did a great job of rebuilding, but if we're not careful, we're going to lose what we fought so hard to save."

Old Harlem

The question, often unspoken, bubbles beneath many conversations about the new Harlem: What becomes of old Harlem, which is to say Black Harlem?

Harlem long fired the imaginations of black Americans. Taking root with the black migration north in the 1900s, Harlem was about Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois and Strivers Row and Sugar Hill. It had avant-garde dance and theater, and offered an urbane voice in matters of politics. Harlem, Ralph Ellison wrote, was: "Our own homegrown version of Paris."

The Great Depression began Harlem's long decline, which accelerated in the 1960s and '70s. Now the new renaissance has whites — and well-to-do African Americans — moving uptown.

A Swedish couple lives in a condo on Malcolm X. A French filmmaker purchased a brownstone on 120th Street, three doors from where Ragland and Norwood are being pushed out.

"Once upon a time, you only saw white people in Harlem if they were buying drugs or they were lost," said real-estate broker William John Wooten, who is black and has worked in Harlem for eight years. "Now they are walking their dogs or going for a jog."

Harlem's name is squeezed and trademarked. That old Heroin Alley? In realtor-speak it's SOHA: South Harlem. NOHA is North Harlem. A real-estate ad proposes rechristening it all as "The New Upper West Side."

"You have some newcomers whose attitude is: 'I'm buying property and your time is short,' " said Karen Phillips, a longtime Harlemite and planning commissioner. "And you have young black kids who haven't spent time around wealthy whites. It's a very delicate dynamic."

Drop in crime

Harlem's population is 77 percent black, down from 87 percent in 1990. It is 2 percent white, a figure that is rising fast. Over in the Mount Morris Park Historic District, Bill Rohlfing talks of being elected the first white block-association president in at least a century.

"I was stunned to be elected," says the real-estate developer. "The black homeowners told me that I had gotten a lot done and that I don't see in color. Three years ago, I don't think this could happen."

Few working-class Harlem residents would reject this rebirth. Even those who can't purchase a million-dollar condo know that crime has dropped by half. When the rich raise a ruckus, more cops walk the street, supermarkets open and the schools take a turn for the better.

Some low- and middle-income Harlemites have mined their own vein of gold. Some teachers, bus drivers and social workers scooped up hundreds of city-owned brownstones for a pittance. Others obtained deeply discounted condos.

This has boosted black home ownership by three full percentage points in the past decade, though it still stands at just 10 percent, compared with 33 percent citywide. "This has created equity for a whole class of African Americans who, a generation ago, could not even buy their own business," said Wright of Abyssinian Development.

The downside is that rents have jumped, and Harlem's low-income residents spend an average of half their income on rent. Demand remains fierce.

Last year, Renaissance Plaza, a smart-looking cooperative, opened its doors on 116th Street. Thanks to city assistance, the co-ops were priced for people with incomes between $36,000 and $133,000. In three days, the developer received 4,000 applications for 240 apartments.

In these gilded days, Harlem's future trajectory is difficult to discern. Maybe the market washes away the poor. Maybe the housing market tanks and Harlem enters a new valley of shadow.

Or maybe the neighborhood that the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. called "the promised land" finds a new resurrection. Phillips, the planning commissioner, recalls a decade ago when friends asked, half embarrassed: Is it safe to move there?

"I'm an optimist. Harlem has a chance to be one of the few neighborhoods where you have a true mix of races and incomes," she said. "The challenge is to keep the housing affordable and to remind people that we live in a neighborhood with a heritage of struggle."