Harlem/Economy

Economy
Harlem has undergone remarkable growth since the devastation of riots in the 1960s. Today 125th Street is booming retail location. While many of the stores are chains, there are numerous street merchants selling local goods.

For a revealing guide on doing business in Harlem, see this December 20, 2010 article in the New York Times In a Changing Harlem, Rift Between Old and New Business Owners "In a Changing Harlem, Rift Between Old and New Business Owners."

Historically, the neighborhood suffered from unemployment rates higher than the New York average (generally more than twice as high), and high mortality rates as well. In both cases, the numbers for men have been consistently worse than the numbers for women. Unemployment and poverty in the neighborhood resisted private and governmental initiatives to ameliorate them. In the 1960s, uneducated blacks could find jobs more easily than educated ones could, confounding efforts to improve the lives of people who lived in the neighborhood through education. Infant mortality was 124 per thousand in 1928 (twice the rate for whites). By 1940, infant mortality in Harlem was 5% (one black infant in twenty would die), still much higher than white, and the death rate from disease generally was twice that of the rest of New York. Tuberculosis was the main killer, and four times as prevalent among Harlem blacks than among New York's white population.

A 1990 study reported that 15-year-old black women in Harlem had a 65% chance of surviving to age 65, about the same as women in India. Black men in Harlem, on the other hand, had a 37% chance of surviving to age 65, about the same as men in Angola. Infectious diseases and diseases of the circulatory system were to blame, with a variety of contributing factors, including consumption of the deep-fried foods traditional to the South and neighborhood, which may contribute to heart disease.

The neighborhood remains a predominantly African-American area, with census data revealing about 72% of the population in 2005 to have been black. The number of white residents has increased from only 672 people in 1980, about 0.5% of the population, to some 5000 people, or 4.3% of the population, in 2005. As of September 2008, their number was estimated to have tripled from 2005 levels.