page_title: History of Harlem
section_title: Housing stock
hierarchical_section_title: History of Harlem / 1946–1969 / Housing stock
caption_attribution_description: One of the few condemned buildings that last in Harlem, 2379 Frederick Douglass Boulevard, photographed on May 14, 2005.
context_page_description: Founded in the 17th century as a Dutch outpost, Harlem developed into a farming village, a revolutionary battlefield, a resort town, a commuter town, a ghetto, and a center of African-American culture.
context_section_description: Little investment in private homes or businesses took place in the neighborhood between 1911 and the 1990s. However, the unwillingness of landlords elsewhere in the city to rent to black tenants, together with a significant increase in the black population of New York, meant that rents in Harlem were for many years higher than rents elsewhere in the city, even as the housing stock decayed. In 1920, one-room apartments in central Harlem rented for $40 to whites or $100–$125 to blacks. In the late 1920s, a typical white working-class family in New York paid $6.67 per month per room, while blacks in Harlem paid $9.50 for the same space. The worse the accommodations and more desperate the renter, the higher the rents would be. This pattern persisted through the 1960s; in 1965, CERGE reported that a one-room apartment in Harlem rented for $50–$74, while comparable apartments rented for $30–$49 in white slums. The high rents encouraged some property speculators to engage in block busting, a practice whereby they would acquire a single property on a block and sell or rent it to blacks with great publicity. Other landowners would panic, and the speculators would then buy additional houses relatively cheaply. These houses could then be rented profitably to blacks.
  After the Harlem River Houses, America's first federally subsidized housing project, were opened in 1937, other massive housing projects soon followed, with tens of thousands of units constructed over the next twenty years, especially in Harlem.
  In the post-World War II era, Harlem ceased to be home to a majority of the city's blacks, but it remained the cultural and political capital of black New York, and possibly black America. The character of the community changed in the years after the war, as middle-class blacks left for the outer boroughs (primarily the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn) and suburbs. The percentage of Harlem that was black peaked in 1950, at 98.2%. Thereafter, Hispanic, Asian, and white residents have increased their share.
  The high cost of space forced people to live in close quarters, and the population density of Harlem in these years was stunning—over 215,000 per square mile in the 1920s. By comparison, in 2000, Manhattan as a whole had a population density under 70,000 per square mile. The same forces that allowed landlords to charge more for Harlem space also enabled them to maintain it less, and many of the residential buildings in Harlem fell into disrepair. The 1960 census showed only 51% of housing in Harlem to be "sound", as opposed to 85% elsewhere in New York City. In 1968, the New York City Buildings Department received 500 complaints daily of rats in Harlem buildings, falling plaster, lack of heat, and unsanitary plumbing. Tenants were sometimes to blame; some would strip wiring and fixtures from their buildings to sell, throw garbage in hallways and airshafts, or otherwise damage the properties which they lived in or visited.
  As the building stock decayed, landlords converted many buildings into "single room occupancies", or SROs, essentially private homeless shelters. In many cases, the income from these buildings could not support the fines and city taxes charged to their owners, or the houses suffered damage that would have been expensive to fix, and the buildings were abandoned. In the 1970s, this process accelerated to the point that Harlem, for the first time since before World War I, had a lower population density than the rest of Manhattan. Between 1970 and 1980, for example, Frederick Douglass Boulevard between 110th Street and 125th Street in central Harlem lost 42% of its population and 23% of its remaining housing stock. By 1987, 65% of the buildings in Harlem were owned by the City of New York, and many had become empty shells, convenient centers for drug dealing and other illegal activity. The lack of habitable buildings and falling population reduced tax rolls and made the neighborhood even less attractive to residential and retail investment.
  Inadequate housing contributed to racial unrest and health problems. However, t
caption: A dilapidated Harlem building, photographed on May 14, 2005. The building has since been demolished.
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