Joshua S. Bauchner, with his 2-year-old daughter, Evlalia, moved to Harlem in 2007. “In Manhattan, there are only so many directions you can go,” he said.


For nearly a century, Harlem has been synonymous with black urban America. Given its magnetic and growing appeal to younger black professionals and its historic residential enclaves and cultural institutions, the neighborhood’s reputation as the capital of black America seems unlikely to change soon.


“I feel a community here that I don't feel in other parts of the city,” said But the neighborhood is in the midst of a profound and accelerating shift. In greater Harlem, which runs river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks are no longer a majority of the population — a shift that actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked.

By 2008, their share had declined to 4 in 10 residents. Since 2000, central Harlem’s population has grown more than in any other decade since the 1940s, to 126,000 from 109,000, but its black population — about 77,000 in central Harlem and about twice that in greater Harlem — is smaller than at any time since the 1920s.

In 2008, 22 percent of the white households in Harlem had moved to their present homes within the previous year. By comparison, only 7 percent of the black households had.

“It was a combination of location and affordability,” said Laura Murray, a 31-year-old graduate student in medical anthropology at Columbia, who moved to Sugar Hill near City College about a year ago. “I feel a community here that I don’t feel in other parts of the city.”

Change has been even more pronounced in the narrow north-south corridor defined as central Harlem, which planners roughly define as north of 110th Street between Fifth and St. Nicholas Avenues.

There, blacks account for 6 in 10 residents, but those born in the United States make up barely half of all residents. Since 2000, the proportion of whites living there has more than doubled, to more than one in 10 residents — the highest since the 1940s. The Hispanic population, which was concentrated in East Harlem, is now at an all-time high in central Harlem, up 27 percent since 2000.

Harlem, said Michael Henry Adams, a historian of the neighborhood and a resident, “is poised again at a point of pivotal transition.”

Harlem is hardly the only ethnic neighborhood to have metamorphosed because of inroads by housing pioneers seeking bargains and more space — Little Italy, for instance, has been largely gobbled up by immigrants expanding the boundaries of Chinatown and by creeping gentrification from SoHo. But Harlem has evolved uniquely.

Because so much of the community was devastated by demolition for urban renewal, arson and abandonment beginning in the 1960s, many newcomers have not so much dislodged existing residents as succeeded them. In the 1970s alone, the black population of central Harlem declined by more than 30 percent.

“This place was vacated,” said Howard Dodson, director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “Gentrification is about displacement.”

Meanwhile, the influx of non-Hispanic whites has escalated. The 1990 census counted only 672 whites in central Harlem. By 2000, there were 2,200. The latest count, in 2008, recorded nearly 13,800.

“There’s a lot of new housing to allow people to come into the area without displacing people there,” said Joshua S. Bauchner, who moved to a Harlem town house in 2007 and is the only white member of Community Board 10 in central Harlem. “In Manhattan, there are only so many directions you can go. North to Harlem is one of the last options.”

In 1910, blacks constituted about 10 percent of central Harlem’s population. By 1930, the beginnings of the great migration from the South and the influx from downtown Manhattan neighborhoods where blacks were feeling less welcome transformed them into a 70 percent majority. Their share of the population (98 percent) and total numbers (233,000) peaked in 1950.

In 2008, according to the census, the 77,000 blacks in central Harlem amounted to 62 percent of the population.

The number of blacks living in greater Harlem hit a high of 341,000 in 1950, but their share of the population didn’t peak until 1970, when they made up 64 percent of the residents. In 2008, there were 153,000 blacks in greater Harlem, and they made up 41 percent of the population.

About 15 percent of Harlem’s black population is foreign-born, mostly from the Caribbean, with a growing number from Africa.

http://www.nytimes.com/20...arlem.html

I moved to Harlem 15 yrs ago... and i see the change

Bill Clinton's move there was a pretty public advertisement for the area.

I'd like to know what the percentage of gays live in harlem and if this correlates with the typical gays moving and improving the neighborhood followed by the straight yuppies?

Interesting article. I don't think gentrification is always a bad thing though.

There goes the neighborhood!

When Morrissey began playing at the Apollo, I knew times had changed.

sextonseven said:

Did he escape the hook?

NDRU said:

Fortunately it wasn't amateur night that night.

http://www.spin.com/artic...lo-theater

at this rate there won't be any black people left in harlem.

banks said:

Why is it one of the "last options"?

PunkMistress said:

Because Manhattan is a long, skinny island and everything south of 110th (the northern-most edge of Central Park) is really, really expensive. If you want to stay in Manhattan and try to have lower rent but still get a decent sized apartment (by Manhattan standards), you have to go to Harlem or even further north (Washington Heights, Sugar Hill, etc.).

PunkMistress said:

it isn't as a racist as it sounds.

it's the geography of manhattan. all of manhattan below harlem has become unaffordable. harlem and up is the only places in manhattan that go for less than several thousand a month, and those are already starting to get to being too expensive.

i live in brooklyn. most new yorkers who work in manhatttan and are on a budget live in brooklyn or queens, which is east of manhattan. the bronx and stanten are harder to access. people have even started going west to new jersey in search of affordable housing.
[Edited 1/6/10 19:14pm]

jone70 said:

exactly.

lazycrockett said:

that's generally the way here. when i first moved into my neighbohood, i was coming out of a deli, and a black teen saw me and said "aw, shit, here come the rich white gays and gentrification."

i am the only white person i see in my neighborhood on a regular basis.

i laughed and told him i am nowhere even close to rich and my white friends find this neighborhood terrifying, which they do, as racist as it is.

i hope no one follows me in though. i love my neighborhood.

NDRU said:

Things happen, time and demographics change. A neighbourhood and community in flux is a healthier, more vibrant one than one caught in stasis.

Just look at the history of NYC.

Neighborhoods and boroughs have changed constantly through time.

Italian Harlem became Spanish Harlem.

Large parts of The Bronx and East Village were Italian... East Village became what it is, and those sections of the Bronx are now primarily all Dominican, Puerto Rican, and African American.

Little Italy is mostly Chinatown these days.

It's bittersweet when an ethnic group leaves a historical area. On one hand, U want the area 2 reflect it's history, but on the other hand, U must also support folks wanting 2 leave.

NDRU said:

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in his office. You can imagine the hijinks going on in that joint.

I really don't understand how anyone can afford to live in NY at all

just don't get it.

abigail05 said:

It's starting to be a struggle for ALL but the rich.
I don't care how many white folk move into Harlem where I live but with that is coming incredible rent increases.
It's like the greedy land lords know that whites will live uptown now and jack up the rents, leaving Blacks who have lived in Harlem for years no place to go.
It's tough finding even small apartments for under $1000 a month yet we as a city voted in a mayor who should not have even been eligible for a third term and is all about big businesses and his rich cronies getting even richer.
Getting what we deserve I guess.

I'm white (and gay) and I moved to Harlem at the beginning of 2007. I love it there and have always felt right at home there. Even in the short time I've been there, I've seen the neighborhood change dramatically--some good, some bad, of course. If I could afford it, I would love to buy a home there.

lazycrockett said:

I don't have any idea about actual numbers, but there's a gay scene in Harlem. It's not always right out in the open, but it's there. And I see more and more guys who set off my gaydar getting out at the Harlem subway stops, so my unscientific theory is that the gay scene is growing more and more in Harlem.

Giovanni777 said:

See, I think that's the sticking point. Do African Americans want to leave their neighborhood? Or are they being pushed out by gentrification?

I love an ethnically diverse neighborhood, and I'd desire never to live in one that wasn't. But when shifting demographics effectively rid an area of the people who gave it its personality (and thereby bars them from profiting either from that work or the riches of diversification), I lament that.

The good news is that the Harlem of 2010 is more diverse now than it has been at any time over the past century. If this time of flux -- and mix -- could last, it'd be awesome. But it can't last, given rising rents from the marketability of a progressively "whiter" neighborhood. My fear is Harlem ultimately turning into a copy of any given downtown Manhattan neighborhood, which, though they're not altogether lacking in their own forms of diversity, would nonetheless suck, I think.
[Edited 1/7/10 9:07am]

Lammastide said:

The answer is right there in the article:

Same thing has happend in downtown Brooklyn..I lived on Clinton and Willoughby and you could tell by more and more white people in Ft Green Park..we all saw it coming.People who couldn't afford Manhattan crossing the bridge.My landlord told us he was selling the brownstone and we had to leave..come to find out he just raised the rent and brought in people from Manhattan who found it cheaper.We just happend to be black and they just happend to be white.It's economics...now when I go back and drive around Ft Green..it's just so....different..When Atlantic Yards is completed,Brooklyn will never be the same...

sextonseven said:

Thanks for pointing this out. It's something I missed.

Other similar communities around the country have seen with this sort of thing. In Boston it's Roxbury. In my native Cleveland it's East Cleveland. When folk go, it seems -- anecdotally at least -- they do it because they feel they have no other choice to survive. I wonder if they'd, in fact, love to stick around if those communities could elicit the attention of city officials, investors, entrepreneurs, etc. that they are bound to attract as the areas become "up-and-coming."

It's a Catch 22. On the one hand, you need "desirables" to move into your neighborhood to make it more marketable to investors, renewal efforts, etc. On the other hand, that very improvement often entails the vacating of the "undesirables" who need it most.
[Edited 1/7/10 11:06am]

cborgman said:

Harlem was the first place my parents moved to when they left the Caribbean in the early 50s and a major part of it was African-American. I still have some family and friends, co-workers that live there, and one of my co-workers was just discussing how she's seen the demographics of her area changing for the past two years.

abigail05 said:

I've been living in NY the majority of my life (except between 1990-1995) and it has always been expensive. You either love it or hate it, but all the places I've been, I haven't found anywhere else that is as exciting as NYC. Hard to leave it.
[Edited 1/7/10 13:58pm]

2elijah said:

I moved to Harlem when the revitalization began 15 yrs ago and i can't begin to explain how diffrent it is now... I have about 6 white families( 2 of them are Interracial couples) on my block and It's been cool... People are leaving because they cannot afford the rent.. My bestfriend parent's bought their Brownstone back in 84 for 26 thousand... 3 yrs ago they were offered 1.1 mill for the place.. They didn't sell..