THE HARLEM BROWNSTONE LOTTERY (1982)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** In 1981, New York City felt it could no longer wait for gentrification to arrive in Harlem. The city’s finances were bleeding revenues through the decade-long erosion of its tax-paying property base. There were so many foreclosed brownstones on the city’s delinquency rolls that the earth beneath those structures had literally begun to lie fallow. And the City, as the owner of more than half of Harlem’s brownstone stock at this point (which included about 300 brownstones), was looking for ways to staunch the bleeding and bring its brownstone patients back from the brink of an eternal abyss. It was thus that, in an attempt to return that life’s blood to these lifeless patients, the City decided to find an innovative way to put owners back into Harlem’s glorious but abandoned and deteriorating brownstones. They held a lottery. THE HARLEM BROWNSTONE LOTTERY Settling upon a lottery as the means of distributing the old brownstones to middle-class Harlem families, the city’s housing department announced an application plan. The City would accept applications from (mostly) Harlem residents who had an annual income of at least $20,000. Each applicant would have a chance to buy – at a steep discount – one of 12 Harlem brownstones. City officials decided to fix the prices of […]
