Blacks No Longer Majority in Harlem

Harlem, the New York City neighborhood often characterized as the capital of black culture in the US, no longer has a majority African-American population. And the shift that occurred a decade ago has accelerated in recent years as whites and Hispanics have bought into an area abandoned by many blacks in the 1960s and ’70s.

“This place was vacated,” one demographer tells the Times. “Gentrification is about displacement.” The white population of central Harlem, 672 in the 1990 census, was pegged at 13,800 in 2008. “There’s a lot of new housing to allow people to come into the area without displacing people there,” one white resident says. “In Manhattan, there are only so many directions you can go. North to Harlem is one of the last options.”
(More Harlem stories.)