Building a Healthy Black Harlem: Health Politics in Harlem, New ...

Harlem rents well in excess of the citywide average. In Twenty-Four Hundred Negro Families in Harlem, sociologist Ira De Reid maintained that between 1919 and 1927, when Harlem was becoming a predominantly black community, the monthly rents for some Harlem residents increased by almost 100 percent, from $21.66 to $41.77, while the average citywide rate of increase was 10 percent.²⁹ In a 1928 study of housing opportunities in Harlem, Carey Batchelor of the social welfare agency United Neighborhood Houses noted that the average annual rent for the city of New York was $316. However, for Harlem it was $480.³⁰ The same study indicated that Harlem families spent about one-third of their income on rent. Reid found that nearly half of the families studied paid at least 40 percent of their income on rent. Owen Lovejoy's study suggested that black Harlem residents spent more than half of their income on rent. Although researchers have disagreed about the precise percentage of weekly and monthly income spent on rent, their results clearly demonstrated that landlords exploited Harlem residents.³¹ Charles Klein, a landlord in Harlem, transformed nine houses into multiple one-room dwellings. He charged whites $40 for the apartments, but blacks had to pay between $100 and $125.³² Landlords often tried to excuse their exploitation of recently arriving blacks by claiming “rural migrants, unaccustomed to city dwelling, were hard on halls, stairways, and plumbing, and were not careful in the upkeep of their rooms.”³³

High rents and high costs of living did not mean safe and healthy living accommodations. Ann Petry, a black writer living in interwar Harlem, provided a poignant characterization of Harlem's housing situation in the following passage: