New York City also seemed a more symbolically apt location to stage a racial revolution via literary representation because it was the located at the forefront initial pushes to create comprehensive housing policies in cities across the U.S. Up to then a reigning truism of urban real estate was that Black residents never paid up for it, did not know how to manage it, and almost always ran whatever homes and neighborhoods they occupied into the ground… not that realtors refused them access to all but the lowest-quality housing, that white banks refused them financing, or that landlords overcharged them despite Black families’ restricted incomes.
Harlem’s existence as a modern-built, mostly Black neighborhood (multiple scholars claim that it was the finest urban housing occupied by Black residents anywhere in the country at the time) in the 1920s was a flying “f*ck you” to anyone and everyone comfortable believing in such a narrative, or who might use it as the basis for further discriminatory rules in regards to housing access and finance.
Location set Harlem apart from Chicago’s Bronzeville in terms of its representative capabilities here, too. This was because the singular real estate market of New York City in the 1920s represented a uniquely propitious if accidental support for Black Harlem’s achievement. Enabled by a real estate bubble collapse in 1904, Black realtors like Philip Payton had successfully finagled white prejudice and leveraged Black institutional wealth to begin transforming the neighborhood from its intended status of an upper-middle-class white enclave to an emerging Black Mecca.
Further major developments in the housing market in New York through the 1920s hastened this initial breakthrough along. Most buildings in New York up to then were built speculatively by small builders using precarious financing, and the cost of stringent new housing regulations plus rising construction costs made it difficult for them to withstand any market shocks. New rent regulations in New York additionally made it desirable to find tenants unlikely to take landlords to court for unreasonable increases, which, combined with a wartime spike in Black migration made it more lucrative than not to allow Black tenants into formerly all-white buildings, especially those whose residents already seethed at Black migration to Harlem.
Lastly, the fact that very few people at all owned their homes in New York City (thus removing the utility of racially restrictive covenants that rose in popularity after racial zoning’s demise) made it difficult to stem Harlem’s racial transformation. Most all of these enabling factors would disappear shortly thereafter, but in the 1920s they helped make Harlem the Harlem that we know now.