Do I Belong Here?

Who does belong in Harlem?

My partner and I are entered into several of New York’s vaunted 80/20 housing lotteries. We recently started visiting some of the places we’re entered into lotteries for just to get the feel of the neighborhoods we might be calling home. After twenty years in the same apartment, the notion of living anywhere else is mind-boggling. But…I’m ready. Updated November 2, 2021

I moved to Harlem in 2002. I’d been in New York City 15 months, going to school part-time, working part-time, and plugging my numbers into the university’s off-campus housing database every day. Being in a very decent share situation I wasn’t in any rush to jump ship. I was paying $400 a month for a huge corner bedroom in a roomy apartment up in Inwood at the very northern tip of Manhattan. The building was situated at the end of a cul-de-sac that led into Isham Park and featured a mockingbird to serenade me at night. I was in great shape.

But I really wanted my own place.

So for 13 months, I religiously scoured that housing site. Then I had a come-to-Jesus moment when I realized that I was being silly. Because I was going to school I was only working 16 hours a week, living on student loan reimbursements and a tiny paycheck. No way was I ever going to be able to afford a place of my own in this city. So cool your jets, sister, and be happy with what you got (yes, that’s really how I talk to myself).

Time to clean house

I looked around and understood that I was sitting pretty right where I was. That bedroom was enormous. My roommate was a cardiac unit nurse so we lived different shifts and $400 a month was incredibly cheap even then. I decided to give that big room a good, thorough cleaning. And the week after I did that, I logged back onto the housing site — hey, you can never tell, right? — and hit the Super Lotto of Manhattan apartments.

1 bedroom, elevator building, rent-stabilized, income-restricted on the day of the initial lease signing, washers and dryers in the basement, two blocks from Central Park and two blocks from the 2/3 subway lines (insider tip: number train lines are more reliable than letter train lines with the G being especially iffy).

You need to sit down now. Ready? $597 a month with one and two-year leases available. In 2002, not 1992. Or 1982.

I told the super not to show the place to anyone else. I immediately called the leasing agent and two days later I handed over a bad check for first, last, and security — hallelujah for overdraft protection — and signed my first lease. And at the beginning of April 2002, I moved into a 24-unit building that had been built in 1910 and gut-renovated in the ’80s. I’ve been here ever since.

Harlem is my home

I’ve never lived anywhere in my life as long as I’ve lived here. Coming up on 19 years in the same apartment. The income restriction clause was limited to the signing of the initial lease, so my rent is not affected by my income. It is, however, affected by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board (NYCRGB). During the Bloomberg years, we’d get rent increases of 5, 6, and even 8% (let’s see what they come up with for 2021/22). Since Di Blasio has been in office not only have increases topped out at 2.5% for two-year leases but there have also been unprecedented rent freezes for one-year leases more than once.

All of which means that the apartment my partner joined me in in 2012 is still actually affordable and not by the bloated NYC definition of the word.

I know I look like a gentrifier but really I’m living here for two reasons: I can actually afford my rent and — for the most part — I like my neighborhood (ok, three: I can’t afford to move). I like that the shops are all within a two-to-six-block radius. I shop here all the time. I know the people who work in the stores by name. I like how my neighbor, Maria, across the street always yells, “Hey, MaMI, how you doin’?”

When I moved into this building in 2002, I was one of only two White people in the building. Now I can count maybe a dozen Black neighbors still here.

We’re currently on our third “new” owners and each new outfit works to clean the place up to lure more market-rate tenants. The owners just before this crew bought 36 buildings in Harlem and Washington Heights about half an hour before strong tenant protection legislation was passed. They dumped their hot potatoes in the laps of our current owners/management company which immediately fired half the supers and all the porters. After about fifteen years of superficial gentrification of this building, we’re now sliding backward.

The White people are leaving. No one, including me, is sad to see them go. But then I have to stop and remember: oh right, I’m a White people.

Should I leave?

It was only after I’d lived up here for several years that it dawned on me how comforting it has to be to live in a neighborhood surrounded by people who look like you. Where you’re just a person, not a Black person.

Is it uncomfortable to be a lone White face in stores where everyone else is Black? Not anymore. But, yeah, there was a time when I’d get off the train on the Upper West Side and feel a tiny shiver of relief at being among White faces again. I tend to forget that I’m White because this is my neighborhood and these are my neighbors. Certain things can kick it up. Getting beat up in the front hallway of my building did a number on my head. For several months after that, I felt horribly White and out of place every time I stepped out of my apartment.

Several of the older gentlemen around here used to like to laugh and tell me that I’d never have made it living here on my own back in the day. I told my YMCA buddy, Jeanie, that once and she laughed. “Oh, honey, with your attitude, you’da been fine. Besides, you’re not White. You’re Tammy!”

That’s all very soothing to my White liberal guilt as you can imagine

And if you’re not aware of how the Black people who grew up around here have been totally shafted by institutionalized racism, wake TF up.

But the fact remains it could be that because I’m in this apartment a Black person who may badly need to live in Harlem isn’t. Maybe a young Black writer or painter who fled nightmare neighborhoods in Omaha or Detroit or Miami or Kansas City. Or a retired school teacher who’s losing her apartment up on 145 and Adam Clayton Powell because of — in three-part harmony here — gentrification. Another fact: just because I’m not here doesn’t guarantee that a Black person who really needs to be in Harlem now will get the place. I don’t get to choose who gets this apartment (which is a real drag, right?).

The point, however, is moot. I can’t afford to move. And make no mistake there are days when I wish I could. The washers and dryers in the basement have been broken for over six months with no clue as to when they’ll be repaired or replaced. I came home several weeks ago and saw a woman passed out cold on the sidewalk three doors up from our building. Two guys stood there looking at her, neither had bothered to call 911. The drug sales and use are off the charts and police just sit in their cruisers looking at their smartphones. I used to think nothing of coming in by myself at 3 and 4 am. Now? Yeah, no.

So, oh yes, I would like to live where these things aren’t going on. So would all my neighbors.

With the eviction freeze about to go away, it’s all going to go even further south in ways we are not ready for. Of course, that’s going to affect other neighborhoods as well. The worried White people can pack up their U-Hauls and skedaddle to more promising places but our friend, the virus, is making sure that there are no promising places.

So do I belong in Harlem, this long-time haven for Blacks in America and around the world?

No, not really.

But here I am and here I’ll be staying for the foreseeable future. I’ll continue doing what I can to be a decent neighbor. I’ll shop here and hang out here and stop to chat with Henry outside the grocery store and check out the new seafood shop. It’s not a fair and just world. It can be brutal and frightening and violent and it’s totally skewed in the wrong direction.

So I’ll just keep shrugging off the occasional stink eye I get.

And keeping an eye on the real estate listings.

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