Community fights gentrification in Harlem

Part I reported the attempts to gentrify New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation.

Nellie Bailey

Nellie Bailey of the Harlem Tenants Council in New York, which is fighting the gentrification of Harlem, said: “In Harlem and in cities around the country the gentrification has been a gradual process, over several years or decades. In New Orleans since the hurricanes it has been wholesale displacement, in one fell swoop.”

The New York City social service agency, Coalition for the Homeless, says there are 36,166 people who sleep in the city’s shelters and welfare hotels each night, and 14,884 are children.

“Those statistics are only the tip of the iceberg.” Bailey told Workers World, “We can’t account for the people who live on the street, or who are staying with friends and families, doubling and tripling up in small apartments. Families are being pushed out by terrible living conditions, or evicted by landlords because they can’t afford the rents.”

Bailey stated that the 2004 Vera Institute for Justice’s study on family homelessness in New York showed that, among other factors, neighborhoods experiencing gentrification like Central Harlem had higher numbers of families becoming homeless. Central Harlem ranked in the top 10 neighborhoods in the city with a high displacement rate.

In the last two years, a new grassroots movement, The Coalition to Preserve Community, has led the opposition to gentrification of West Harlem. One of the city’s largest landlords, Columbia Uni versity, is carrying out this gentrification with the support of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Columbia’s Manhat tan ville Expansion Plan is a 17-acre land grab aimed at doubling the size of the university’s campus by using the law of eminent domain, which allows the government to seize land.

Many fear the plan will displace homes and small businesses from 125th Street to 133rd in the West Harlem area. The crowning goal of Columbia’s plan is to build a bio-chemical research center, which would have five stories below ground level, potentially wreaking havoc on the environment.

The Coalition to Preserve Community has united community groups, such as Harlem Tenants Council, together with workers’ and students’ groups from Columbia itself to fight the plan. For two years activists have gone door to door with literature and held rallies and press conferences to expose the back-room deal between the Bloomberg administration and Columbia.

On Nov. 16, over 300 people attended the first public hearing to discuss Columbia’s plan. The participants included community members, environmentalists, students, religious leaders and business owners, who came out to give Columbia a resounding “No!”

According to the student newspaper the Columbia Spectator, during the six-and-half hour hearing, all 70 people who took the floor opposed the expansion plan. Some were so outraged that they continued to speak even after their microphones were cut off.

Both New Orleans and Harlem are seen historically as Black cultural centers in the United States. Both are world-renowned for their music and food. Both Harlem and New Orleans are birthplaces of culture and community for lesbian, gay, bi and trans people, especially of color.

The people of both Harlem and New Orleans, and those in many urban centers across the country, are engaged in the struggle for the right of self-determination and to stop the racist displacement of entire communities through gentrification. At the heart of this struggle is the lack of affordable housing in the city. Under capitalism, affordable housing, like jobs, access to quality education and healthcare, is not treated as a human right, but as a privilege for those with money.

According to Bailey, “Across the country, you can see U.S. capitalists’ aim with gentrification is to follow the European model. The inner cities were once for the poor and working class, for communities of color. But now they will be only for the wealthy. The working class will be priced out and forced to commute in from suburban ghettos, like in France.”

As the fiery uprisings in those suburbs of Paris have shown, for the ruling class, the displacement and disenfranchisement of working and poor people will always come with a price.