The End of Gentrification in Harlem
Black Harlem is in a current state of flux, but who’s to blame?
Morgan Jenkins imagined moving to Harlem, a historically black neighborhood, meant finding herself coalesced within a culturally and racially homogeneous community.
“I assumed that because of my skin color and kinky hair, I would fuse right into the community and be on one accord with its people but I could not have been more wrong.”
Jenkins believed herself to be an outsider amid a sea of hostility geared towards Harlem’s newcomers — the individuals supposedly gentrifying the formerly predominantly black neighborhood. Detailing her story in The Guardian, Jenkins views herself as a “parasite” and despite her connective racial identity, Jenkins believes that her presence is damaging to the neighborhood she feels so naturally aligned to.
Jenkins describes her move to Harlem as a story of “cheap rent and rich history” — but, contrary to what she believes, her search for affordable housing and heritage is not enough to make her a gentrifier.
Moving into a historically low-income, working class neighborhood because of “cheap rent” is not gentrification — Jenkins’ ability to move in and potentially move people out of Harlem is because of gentrification.
Gentrification is the institutional process of disenfranchising poor people from owning the urban spaces they inhabit. Sociologist Sharon Zukin defines gentrification as: “The conversion of socially marginal and working-class areas of the central city to middle-class residential use.” Zukin adds that gentrification began as a movement in the 1960s of “private-market investment capital into downtown districts of major urban centers.”
Zukin refers to gentrification as a “phenomenon” — a phenomenon that is bigger than Jenkins’ own individual guilt. Gentrification is not something one persons acts on, rather, it is something that acts on an entire community. It builds over decades. Gentrification means crowded urban neighborhoods with abandoned apartment buildings, communal space available specifically for commercial property and not for affordable homes, and the flooding of indiscernible real estate capital into low-income, predominantly black and brown neighborhoods.
Gentrification is the commercialization of residential neighborhoods, in which value is fixed in profit and not in communal heritage.
To understand gentrification, and conversely, who qualifies as a gentrifier, means understanding the history of residential disenfranchisement in predominately black neighborhoods. Decades of redlining and segregation have contributed to the current lack of ownership and wealth that continuously uproots urban black communities.
Redlining is a process in which people are denied financial services, like loans or fair mortgage rates, because of the inherent prejudices of lenders. In a 1986 study, Richard Schaffer and Neil Smith of Columbia University documented the potential for gentrification in Harlem following decades of “severe redlining”, concluding that Harlem had “been almost completely redlined.” This means that not only are most Harlem residents renting their homes, but it means that the few paying prejudicially high monthly mortgages, are likely to never actually own their homes.
The current rate of homeownership in Harlem is 5.2 percent — not accounting for the number of which are black homeowners. The lack of homeownership in Harlem, resulting from decades of redlining is what has precipitated the now visible gentrification that Jenkins herself recognizes as “coffee chains, hipster restaurants and cocktail bars.”
In her simplification of gentrification, Jenkins directs us to the observable commercial changes Harlem has endured, instead of distinguishing the more impactful real estate entities that prioritize aesthetic coffee shops over affordable housing. It’s the job of these real estate companies to sell us an ideal Harlem, which means more artisan cafés and less unsightly public housing.
In a 2011 piece for the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates recognizes the deficit of ownership and agency in urban black communities as the antecedent for the apparent “black flight” that gentrification has ignited. According to Coates, the current “angst” that black people in changing urban spaces feel — which is ultimately the angst Jenkins feels — comes from the “lifting of the illusion” of ownership. The absence of this illusion is what directs our gaze to symbols like coffee shops and hipsters, since we are now witnessing the aftermath of decades of an opaque subjugation.
The New York Times calls this phenomenon “The End of Black Harlem” — and in a way, they are correct. Deeply etched into the identity of Harlem is the “rich history” of blackness that Jenkins believed she belonged to, but rather than seeing the trauma Harlem is currently enduring as its identity changes, Jenkins sees herself as part of a systemic process that’s been in place long before her arrival.
“I thought that gentrification did not apply to me. Because I’m a black woman, I was the victim. In Harlem, this message is turned upside down. Rather than the victim, I am the perpetrator.”
Categorizing herself as a “perpetrator” of gentrification, because of her newness to Harlem and her relatively high income, means Jenkins is essentially ignoring the history of the neighborhood she’s so desperate to belong to. Coates also identifies nostalgia as something impeding our ability to recognize gentrification beyond tired notions of fancy bars and coffee shops.
Jenkins moved to Harlem with the assumption that the neighborhood still existed as a place of happy black folks in brownstones, b-ball games and Friday night jazz at the Lenox Lounge — but those are all remnants of Harlem’s past. Harlem today is in a state of change and that change has nothing to do with Jenkins being a “parasite” — the end of black Harlem came at the hands of forgotten redlining, racism, and unregulated greed. And most significantly, black Harlem ends because it was never meant to last.
Perhaps, as Coates suggests, we need to abandon the idea that our black urban spaces will always remain the same. The racial and socioeconomic shifts occurring in Harlem today are the inevitable consequence of the guise of agency black people have had in our communities.
New Harlem World covers stories relating to displacement, gentrification, and social unrest in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. You can reach Martika Ornella on Twitter @martikaornella. New Harlem World is also on Tumblr, and will soon be available as a seasonal zine.
