Recently, homeowners in my corner of Harlem held a soiree in someone’s garden. We form a warm group of 130 people who represent the changing neighborhood—black old-timers with a growing number of whites. Everyone brought a dish or bottle and the talk over the macaroni was cheerful. Did anyone know a good contractor? How did the Little League do this summer? A door prize, a box of Godiva chocolates, was awarded to the longest resident—Dina Morrison, ninety-three, who has lived with her older sister in the same place for sixty-seven years. No one mentioned foreclosures.
Foreclosure crisis? What crisis? Not in Harlem.
Harlem is full of the sort of people who are losing their properties all over New York City, namely little old ladies and working-class African-American families. But the nation’s black capital has been insulated from the sub-prime meltdown by the very thing usually blamed for destroying communities of color—gentrification.
While the dreaded G-word has priced some residents out of the ’hood, we’ve seen a paradoxical upside. The house values that have skyrocketed over the past fifteen years in Harlem scared off many predatory lenders who targeted other black areas. These $1 million-plus price tags have also given homeowners who are struggling to keep apace with mortgage payments the option of selling out before the bank closes in.
“There tends to be a tight connection between property values and foreclosures,” explains Josiah Madar, from the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.
He and other experts understand little about the mechanisms of abusive lending, other than the stark racial component. Eight of the ten top neighborhoods hit by foreclosures in the city are overwhelmingly non-white. A map representing the worst afflicted areas—among them Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, North Bronx, South Jamaica—says it all. Each filing is a dot, and the aforementioned areas resemble solid metastasizing cancers, with several hundred foreclosures each.
Yet the area comprising Hamilton Heights, which claims some of Harlem’s most prized Victorian brownstones, had just eight foreclosure notices, so few one can discern the individual specks.
