"Livable!" snaps a gruff voice. "This is all livable!" A man carrying grocery bags and wearing a ragged satin University of Louisville jacket inserts himself into the conversation.

Maddox tries to ignore the man. "You see here from the signs on the gates, this is where they walked their horses back to the carriage houses. Now those are garages, and they're quite nice."

"Yeah," the man says, "if you're a jailbird and you're used to the five-by-seven."

"Let's go over here," Maddox says, quickening her step.

Callender is several paces behind and comes clicking up on high heels just as the guy with groceries climbs a stoop and unlocks the front door. "I been living here 30 years, right?" he shouts.

"Excuse me?" Callender trills.

"My father was -- "

"Would you like to sell your house for a song?" Callender interrupts. Everyone freezes. "Would you like to sell your house?"

The guy is speechless. Finally he tilts his head back and flicks the fingers of his right hand along his neck and out from under his chin, a gesture understood in any neighborhood.

"We keep coming across illustrators, filmmakers, musicians who live in Harlem," says UBO's Cooper. "To have access to that talent is a huge advantage."

"Oh!" says the startled Callender. "That wasn't a very nice response!"

"Well, it's an appropriate response!" the man spits.

By the end of her two-hour tour, Callender hasn't found anything she's interested in. Maddox promises to redouble her efforts on Callender's behalf, but she isn't lacking for hungry clients. "The biggest problem is to keep and get inventory," she says. "Things turn over so quickly, you're struggling all the time to find the houses to sell." Beneath the economic pressures that are making Harlem a viable option, Maddox, who grew up in Lubbock, Texas, sees a hopeful social trend at work as well. "The young kids who are moving here don't have the myths that their parents might have had, or my parents," Maddox says as her van inches down 125th Street, passing black teenagers checking out the new billboard for rapper Beanie Sigel. "They've been going to school with these kids."

Imani bennett has seen harlem through two sets of eyes. She's been a pioneering homeowner, buying a building twenty years ago on a rugged patch of St. Nicholas Place near 152nd Street, renovating the four-story dwelling, and reaping the profits when she sold it in 1997. "My house has turned over twice," Bennett says. "I sold it to a white family, and the African-Americanness of the neighborhood -- it was a little too much, they didn't like it. It wasn't a block I would have recommended to them. They came from the Upper West Side, and their kids weren't able to meet other private-school kids in the neighborhood."

Bennett has also watched the big picture through her job as a vice-president for commercial services at Fleet Bank, one of the lenders that's taken the lead in underwriting Harlem's redevelopment. "In essence, it is an African-American neighborhood, and it will remain that," Bennett says. "The current wave is having some demographic impact, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Mostly it's African-Americans of means who are coming in."

From her vantage point, Sydney Inis isn't so sanguine. Each morning, she stands drinking her coffee and gazing out an enormous picture window overlooking the corner of Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and 116th Street. "There's a lady, Mabel, who sits out here, four years, at this light pole in the middle of the median," Inis says. "I don't know what her mental illness is. She's the toughest little nail I've ever seen. Mabel is no kid; she's gotta be older than me, and I'm 42. She's been arrested a couple of times, but this is her spot -- winter, summer, snow, storm. I've pulled back on giving her money, because she's admitted to me her crack addiction. But I give her water, food, talk to her. It's hard to look at her, but she's really my touchstone."

In the coming gentrification, Inis worries not simply about the homeless, but about the fate of Harlem's common folk. "I don't think it's just going to be a smooth transition," she says. "There has to be some thought put into the people who can't afford to stay in Harlem, what's going to happen to them. The Caucasians and Europeans and Asians who are moving in, you're going to be the scapegoat, because you're taking something away from people."

Inis means this as a matter-of-fact, real-world observation. She's a freelance fashion and photo stylist who rents at Graham Court, a stone-arched, steel-gated cousin to the Dakota, and she's turned her airy apartment into a breathtaking eight-room advertisement for her considerable talents. Inis is no bleeding-heart liberal; her humanitarian impulse to invite Mabel inside her apartment competes with her worldly tastes. "We've got more fried chicken, fried pork chops, sweet potatoes, blah, blah, blah in Harlem, like that's all we eat!" she says. "Try to get some mesclun, some arugula, a beet! Try to get some soup that's not goat-infested! I would like to have soup and salad across 110th Street. Black people eat soup and salad!"