The image above this text displays two very different sides of New York City. On the right is the wealthy and iconic Upper East Side. Home to New York City’s most well-to-do families, the world-famous Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the setting of countless TV shows, the Upper East Side is not only one of the most desirable places to live in New York but also one world’s most lauded neighborhoods. Although when walking the neighborhood’s streets one could never tell, travel just one mile north and you will quickly find yourself in one of New York’s poorest most underprivileged areas, East Harlem.
East Harlem, depicted on the left side of the image, is a predominantly Latino and Black neighborhood that borders the Upper East Side. Despite the two neighborhoods’ proximity, they could not be more different from one another. In contrast to the Upper East Side’s vast wealth with average household incomes of around $148,000, East Harlem is one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods with residents making an average household income of $36,930 respectively. The two neighborhoods also differ in the urban fabric as illustrated in the above images. While The Upper East Side is home to grand, stately pre-war townhomes and apartment buildings, East Harlem is dominated by modernist public housing towers and decrypt former tenement housing converted into apartments.
The harsh divide between these two neighborhoods has struck me since childhood. Growing up, I lived in East Harlem and was able to attend a prestigious private school on the Upper East Side. In fact, the image on the bottom left corner is a block away from my childhood apartment while the image in the top right corner is merely steps away from where I attended elementary school. Even as a kid the stark differences between the two neighborhoods always stuck out to me. I questioned why was it that Park Avenue on the Upper East Side (pictured in the top right corner) had a beautiful garden median while Park Avenue, yes the same Park Avenue, just a mile north in East Harlem (pictured in the distance in the bottom left corner) had a large train viaduct running through the center. Why was it that the housing on the Upper East Side consisted of doorman-attended apartment buildings, brownstone townhouses, and new luxury high rises while the housing of East Harlem was limited to public housing (derogatorily known as ‘the projects’) or converted tenement housing? While I didn’t know it during my childhood, the answer to many of these questions can be found in one problematic policy practice, Redlining.
Not only in New York but across the United States, the legacy of redlining has left scars on urban neighborhoods generating clear disparities between both rich versus poor neighborhoods and predominantly white versus predominantly minority neighborhoods. From the 1930s to the 1970s the U.S Federal Housing Association in partnership with local housing authorities began designating certain urban neighborhoods as suitable and appropriate for government-assisted loans to local buyers while designating other areas unsuitable for such investment. Unfortunately, given the pervasive racist and classist attitudes of the day, wealthy or white areas were far more likely to be considered suitable for investment than poor or minority-dominant areas. This has resulted in the exacerbation of already existing wealth and racial inequality issues across urban communities in the United States. Unsurprisingly the wealthy, predominantly white Upper East Side was labeled suitable for further investment while the poorer, predominantly non-white East Harlem was considered unsuitable, contributing to the neighborhood being trapped in a cycle of poverty that persists to this day.
Other policies similarly rooted in racism and classism have contributed to the difference in the urban fabric of the two neighborhoods. As New York began to invest heavily in public housing, many of such housing developments were relegated to poor or predominantly black and brown neighborhoods across the city. This practice largely explains the widespread prevalence of modernist and, in my opinion, ugly public housing facilities in East Harlem and their relative absence on the Upper East Side.
Urban policy choices always have transformative, widespread consequences. Sometimes impactful enough that even an elementary schooler can see their results while unaware of what caused them. My personal experience growing up traveling between the neighborhoods of East Harlem and the Upper East Side, separated by a mile but worlds apart, and later gaining knowledge of why the two neighborhoods are so different has illustrated to me how key it is that planners and urban policymakers consider their inherent biases in creating policies and numerous possible unintended consequences of said policies. As New York and cities across the U.S confront balancing an ever-worsening housing crisis with staving off gentrification, planners and policymakers must be vigilant of re-inforcing existing racist and classist structures either through their pre-conceived biases influencing their planning choices or through not fully considering how such policies may affect those who are already the most disadvantaged in American society. If they fail to do so, we risk another generation of children growing up wondering why their neighborhood looks and feels so inadequate when compared to the neighborhood next door.
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