Gentrification is well known for be a force disruptive to both poor and black communities through its abrupt displacement of people, uprooting od communities, and destruction of culture. I believe that as New Yorkers we are all but too familiar with the insane rise of rents and living costs in the city, not just in the past few years but for as long as we can remember. Knowing that a studio apartment anywhere within two square miles of Baruch would cost no less than $2200 is what has kept me living in my parent’s basement in Brooklyn. And yet that same gentrification of large portions of different boroughs of the city makes these area’s inaccessible to low-income college students such as myself. For these precise reasons, I have noticed a growing trend among my friends who are leaving the nest of their parent’s homes- moving into Harlem.

 

According to the New York Times article Priced Out of a Childhood Home, “Between 2000 and 2014, the black population in Central Harlem fell to 55 percent from 77 percent, while the white population rose to 15 percent from 2 percent, a trend echoed in other gentrifying neighborhoods…. The report found that the number of college graduates, young adults and families without children grew much faster in gentrifying neighborhoods than in other parts of the city.” Because of gentrification elsewhere, the comparatively cheaper Harlem rents have become extremely attractive to people whose demographic I fall into. And in the city that never sleeps or hesitates to raise rent costs, can these people then be blamed as perpetrators of the displacement of poor and black communities? The article goes further to describe the daunting path faced by millennials and Gen X’ers in today’s York City: “Although 18- to 29-year-olds are the most educated group of young workers in the city’s history, they earned about 20 percent less in real wages in 2014 than they would have in 2000”. In the case of Harlem, all these people are looking for is cheaper, more affordable housing such that they would be capable of living in the same city in which they work. Although to me this sounds reasonable, it is also a cut and dry example of Gentrification in the city. My questions are this, who really are the “bad guys” in all of this, or are there none? Is this simply the next progression of housing trends in the city as a more highly educated population find themselves in positions they are overqualified for making less money than their parents did for the same work?