Harlem Housing: The Bad and the Good

The New York Times yesterday ran article by Josh Barbanel entitled Harlem (Housing Woes) on His Mind. The article told the story of a relatively high-profile writer, Keith Boykin, who moved into a second floor apartment in a Harlem brownstone in 2001. The apartment served his needs and at $1000 monthly rent didn't break his budget.

Unfortunately, the brownstone, seen at right in a New York Times photo by Susan Farley, was a living monument to corruption, mismanagement, crime and greed.

His building was caught up in a notorious mortgage scandal in which shady mortgage brokers, engineers and appraisers used phony churches and other not-for-profit groups to buy more than 500 deteriorated brownstones in long-troubled neighborhoods at inflated prices. They got federally guaranteed mortgages to buy and rehabilitate them, and then walked way with the money

It's an amazing story of a building with no one providing essential services, of power blackouts (Con Ed pulled the plug), and of a "helpful" super who was carted off to jail as a persistent child molester. It's complicated by Boykin's failure to pay rent and electricity bills for many years because, as Barbanel explains, "there seemed to be no one to pay..."

What's wrong with this picture? What's wrong is the writer's implication that not only are there many other such buildings in Harlem -- in fact, there are -- but that this is the norm for the neighborhood. In fact, it's decidely not.

What's real and normal are the many hundreds of apartments and scores of buildings rehabilitated, renovated, and managed, both ethically and compassionately, by Harlem-based real estate developers like Lois and Milton Manning of Sugarhill Services and Leroy and Ken Morrison of Lemor Realty. The Mannings and the Morrisons are just two of several member firms of the Greater Harlem Real Estate Board who have successfully renovated occupied Harlem buildings under the Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Program of New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Harlem is experiencing a revitalization that is making it, according to New York City Real Estate Appraiser, Ronald M. Gold, "the next hot spot in Manhattan." Tenants like Boykin, whose failure to pay rent and electricity was, according to Barbanel, "a subsidy as valuable to him as a grant, helping him to make ends meet while he researched his new book..." are not the norm, nor are tragic brownstones like the one he calls home. Their story needs to be told, of course, but in the context of the good done by HUD, the City, and particularly, by property developers and managers like the Mannings and Morrisons who, working together, have provided decent, affordable housing to the Harlem community.