ABSTRACT
Harlem was built in the late 1800s and early 1900s for a white middleclass community, but too large a supply of new apartments, in an economic recession, left vacancies that real estate agents decided early on to market to blacks. During the 1960s, community leaders in both Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant pressed the city government to ban racial discrimination in hiring by local stores, organized rent strikes against private landlords who would not make repairs, and demanded racial desegregation of public schools. Like many inner-city neighborhoods across the United States, Harlem and Bed-Stuy lost population in the 1970s and 1980s. Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration, a local development corporation begun by Senator Robert F. Kennedy with both corporate and government funding, renovated housing, set up health care centers, and ran job training programs. By 2005, New York magazine declared that the handsome brownstone blocks of Bedford-Stuyvesant were trembling on the brink of gentrification.
