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Old Posted Jul 12, 2009, 7:55 PM
Crawford Crawford is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Brooklyn, NYC/Polanco, DF
Posts: 30,551
Quote:
Originally Posted by fleonzo View Post
You're right and a lot people don't realize how delicate things can be and "less we forget so easily so that we won't revert back to those times."
Well, not really. Those abandoned buildings and vacant lots were so prominent in Harlem for a variety of reasons that could not easily be replicated.

Harlem did NOT look like that because of disinvestment, at least not primarily. The story of Harlem abandonment is completely different than in other U.S. neighborhoods. It looked similar, but the underlying reasons were very different.

The horrible pics you see are all city-owned land. They were NOT abandoned or neglected by the private sector. They were all purchased by the city for redevelopment.

What happened is that the city took title to HUGE amounts of land in the 1960's and 1970's for high-rise redevelopment (similar to many of the towers you see in the background), but the city went broke in 1976.

Following 1976, all urban renewal projects were put on hold for financial reasons, meaning that vast city-owned swaths of Harlem were left to rot. By the late 1980's, you had huge sections of Harlem that looked like a bomb hit.

Beginning in the early 1990's the city's economy had recovered, and the city decided to enter into public/private parterships with developers to build mixed-income housing on all these sites.

These are the newer buildings you now see. They are mostly condo buildings built by the private sector, with a percentage of the units reserved for moderate income people.

NYC has basically run out big plots of land in Harlem for city-sponsored redevelopment, so now they are turning to privately owned land, and will build taller towers on smaller plots of land.
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