The Thaw

Suddenly, at the end of February, it was 60 degrees outside. The snow melted. The birds flitted singing from tree to tree. And my wife and I, aroused from our winter week-end torpor, saw two movies: “Moonlight” and “I Am Not Your Negro.” These stirring, shocking, extraordinary films about the black experience in America moved us deeply, while at the same time causing me to contemplate, not for the first time, how little progress our real estate industry has made with regard to race over the past twenty five years.

In “I Am Not Your Negro,” the author James Baldwin describes his move to Paris as necessary for him to escape the enormous, ever-present taint of racism which followed him everywhere in this country. In France he felt free – to live where he wished, eat where he wished, socialize as he wished. In the real estate industry we struggle with the simple, but encompassing, issue of representation.

In real estate offices around New York (except those in historically African-American neighborhoods like Harlem or Bed-Stuy) the vast preponderance of agents are white. And in Manhattan, especially south of 96^th Street, the vast preponderance of the clients are white. Black families only occasionally move into the co-ops or the condominiums we represent. And often, when they do, they are not Americans. We see more wealthy Africans purchasing in New York than wealthy black Americans.  And it’s difficult to disentangle the social and economic threads which bind this knot together.

The acceptance into the American mainstream of our gay population has provided a great ray of sunshine into what can sometimes feel like parlous times for our great social experiment. There has been a thaw. Gay couples can marry, can procreate, and can buy co-op apartments on Park Avenue or Central Park West; that represents a change I could not have predicted when I came into the business in 1980. But sadly, having had a black First Family does not mean that many of us New Yorkers have a black neighbor family. Today the issue is not overt prejudice on the part of co-op Boards; the fair housing laws clarify the risks of that position too clearly. It’s socioeconomic.

I remember being struck in high school by the seemingly impregnable barrier between the white kids and the black kids. We sat separately at meals. With few exceptions, we didn’t room together. With few exceptions, we did not cross racial boundaries when dating. And today, looking back at my career, it doesn’t seem so different. In “Moonlight,” one of the deepest, loveliest movies I have been lucky enough to see this year, there is not a single white character. The world of this protagonist, from Miami to prison to Atlanta, never features a white face. It’s the precise antithesis of the Rock Hudson/Doris Day films of the 1950s: the influence of the white world resonates everywhere in the lives of these characters, but there are no actual white people in the restricted, often terrifying world they occupy.

I hope to have ten to fifteen more active years in the real estate business. During that time my greatest joy would be to see these doors meaningfully open. More African-American colleagues around me. More African-American clients and customers to integrate Manhattan south of 110^th Street. We should hope to see not just an influx of gentrification into the traditionally black neighborhoods, but a more general opening up of every neighborhood. But it’s not enough to hope. It’s for me (and you) to create the opportunities to bring this most American vision home to America.