The inside 'dope' on redevelopment

Real Estate Weekly, March 24, 1999 by Thomas F. Campenni

I was walking down a street in East Harlem a few days ago. It was a block I had been on many times in the past. I had bought several vacant buildings in the mid-Seventies on speculation in the neighborhood. It was to be the next new neighborhood - or so I thought. Why, by the early 1980's, it should have been.

Unfortunately, like many other neighborhoods in this city and in our nation trying to return from poverty, another scourge took hold, one so insidious that we were unable to even comprehend its power of devastation - a devastation so complete and absolute that we began to personalize it as an enemy by using the word "war" to describe our response. The enemy was crack cocaine.

The epidemic, or more precisely the pandemic of crack, which spread throughout our poorest neighborhoods, was the direct result of our infatuation with drugs in general. Not only the baby boomers, but also the hippest of their parents became seduced by the promise of feeling good. Many a time, during what became a nation's vacation from common sense, I saw men and women who should have known better using cocaine and pot as if there were no consequences.

It was called recreational drug use. These people were not the stone junkies of an earlier time. No, they were successful members of their middle class communities. They would only occasionally get high while relaxing after a hard day or on Saturday night. The movies and television depicted it as fun and acceptable behavior - a perfect set-up to the introduction of crack cocaine.

Poor neighborhoods were always more susceptible to the disease of drugs. The despair of living a life in poverty is a reason. So is being uneducated and unable to find a job. Alcohol and then drugs have had a more entrenched foothold with the poor. While the rich used brandy and vintage port, the poor had gin and "Thunderbird." However, a change happened 25 years ago which made feeling good take priority over doing the right thing. The nation sunk into a miasma of moral decadence. It was "Do your own thing and everyone else be damned." God country and family were subordinated to one's personal needs. While this morality was disgustedly inane for the rich and middle class, it became genocidal for the poor.

Money buys you quite a bit of protection. There is the Betty Ford Center for some and no treatment for others. One man's dependency becomes the other's addiction. A criminal is someone who doesn't have a bankroll or a private attorney to represent them. A shabby house in a good neighborhood looks like a slum in a poor one.

As the decadence of the Seventies and Eighties faded into the Nineties, a different sensitivity took hold. Tobacco is not to be allowed, let alone drugs. While we may still tolerate the old retched excesses, we don't condone them as we once did. Why, we even see the president clutching the Bible as a prop for the mendacious recanting of his sins.

But the damage wreaked by the years of self abuse are not as easily swayed in the African-American and Hispanic communities. Where once vibrant neighborhoods stood, many have been gutted both physically and emotionally. Some have been gentrified like the Lower East Side, where after years of rampant drug abuse, the tenements have been cleared, not for the next generation of immigrants, but for those who are white and bright.

With each passing year, we have decided that Manhattan is not fit for the poor, but only the rich. We have relegated the middle class to Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, while the poor are more and more shunted from any real neighborhoods to the enclaves of that euphemism known as "city housing." Groups of churches and others occasionally build new one- or two-family homes where once stood tenements that sheltered 10 or 12 families.

Somehow the promise of East Harlem and other such neighborhoods lost a generation of not only new housing, but of people to addiction and prison. In the intervening years, the private sector, but especially the government through their housing and taxation policies, have determined that those most in need of new housing are least likely to find it. Unfortunately, our new self-righteousness society has determined that once again there is no room for those most in need.

(The author is a real estate consultant advising owners, condominiums and co-ops. He welcomes responses in writing at P.O. Box 724. Old Greenwich, CT 06870 or by calling 203-637-5621.)