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Photo by Damaa Bell
The Harlem real estate has cooled considerably since the peak of its heyday just a couple of years ago. A New York Times article declared this morning that ‘Harlem’s real estate boom becomes a bust.’ They later changed the title to "On a Harlem Block, Boarded-Up Buildings and a Changing Mood."
The Times article goes on to tell about a block of 134th street where developers and flippers have been left holding property that is *gasp* (clutch your pearls, folks) worth the value of the homes. Imagine that!
It seems that those ‘investors’ were simply profiteers who gambled on getting the shells and abandoned townhouses fixed up in enough time to make a quick million on property that they knew wasn’t worth that price. They lost the bet.
The real estate market in Harlem has always been a tricky one. In an eerie twist of fate, the current market mirrors that of the past. Harlem came to be an area primarily populated by blacks as a result of overbuilding and over pricing. It fell into disrepair as a result of greed on the part of many absent landlords and a disconnect between the residents and the property owners. See a cycle here?
For example, Craig Charie is trying to sell an unfinished brownstone at 221 West 134th Street. According to The Times article he had contemplated chopping up a single family home, which belonged to a Harlem family for nearly 90 years, and renting it out to Columbia University students. Sounds similar to what happened in the past when Harlem homeowners had to chop up their beautiful homes into odd configurations to help pay the mortgage. Many of the best deals on the once hot market were a result of these converting rooming houses and SROs that greatly diminished the historic and economic value of these properties. There are new homeowners that are still spending thousands of dollars to undo the damage and neglect from these forsaken gems.
It's interesting that an influential newspaper like The Times should declare the Harlem market ‘a bust’ when similar situations are taking place in other once hot neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. As an interesting note, Forbes just listed Greenwich Village, of all places, as one of “America’s fastest falling neighborhoods.“
The way it played out in Harlem was some people entered the market early enough to benefit from the low prices and rising property values. They now live in beautiful and affordable homes that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to achieve living in an overpriced market like New York City. There are others who rode out the market in the beginning and later managed to recoup what they invested before things cooled off too much.
How this is changing tide going to affect the wonderful new businesses that have invested in Harlem. Are lenders and investors going to pull back even more using The Times article as ammunition for the reason want to hold off on investing any more money into what has been deemed ‘a bust?’
Could the flip side of this story be that there might be Harlem homeowners (not developers) that are actually invested in the neighborhood and content to live in what one Harlem blogger called a less “desirable” area? Could there be people who are not simply flipping houses now that the fickle money tree has whither away and died?
Is Harlem a real estate bust or is it simply cooling off and settling into a community that homeowners are willing to invest in long term?
Comments
I would say the answer is yes to your ending question. I bought in Harlem four or almost five years ago and I am happy. I bought there because I wanted to live in a nice, spacious apartment near parks. And I wanted an investment that I could live in verses stocks. If a stock goes bust, you can't live in that. And the change or should I say the building continues in Harlem. Just take a stroll down FDB and you can see for yourself. The Times....pah....what do they know.
Also, we think Harlem is a wonderful community. Check out real positive posts from local Harlemites at HarlemCondoLife.com
I think Harlem reached the tipping point of gentrification before the real estate market started going down, so it will do just fine with a few years of cooling off. All the people who moved in in the last few years were almost exclusively buyers (as opposed to renters), and they're not going to go anywhere - if nothing else, because they won't be able to sell. So Harlem is going to continue evolving into the multi-ethnic community it's become in many ways. I think the overwhelming majority of people who bought in Harlem over the last few years intended to live in their apartments for the medium-term at least, as opposed to flipping it.
I moved to Harlem 15 years ago before the condo's and brownstones were so expensive, it was a great community then and it still is now. I love the area, I am not happy about all the changes to the feel of Harlem. People came in and built and forgot about the long term residence and the small business owners that were there for years. I hope we get back to the small mom an pop shops.
My husband and I moved to harlem 4 yrs ago and our daughter was born soon after we moved. We moved for the longterm. Development has slowed down but quality of life has improved over the last few years. Morningside park has been renovated and the crowd I see is quite different from 4 yrs back.
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