"The typical profile of somebody buying one of our homes is a family with a household income of $50,000 or $60,000," says HPD's Perrine. "With homeownership, there's not only positive effects on the families themselves -- they do better on every scale, from rates of teenage pregnancy to years of education, and it's an incredibly powerful way to build wealth for poor families -- but it has some positive effects on the community as well. Harlem is the most important African-American community we've got in America, and it really needs to be preserved and treasured."

The state is in on the act as well, through its Harlem Community Development Corporation. Its most dramatic work will be on Mount Morris Park West, where nine decaying brownstones were abandoned in the late seventies. All that's left is ghostly steel girders, brownstone fronts, and garbage dumped by passing cars. Disgusted neighbors, most of whom live in adjacent, still-stately homes, dubbed the site "The Ruins." This spring, the HCDC will finally haul away the mess and rebuild.

"The other thing that's important about this project is that it doesn't have a subsidy," says Diane Phillpotts, the state agency's Harlem head. "These will be market-rate units, with apartments selling from $155,000 to $210,000. That's one of the things that is exciting -- there really are people in Harlem who are middle-income who are eager to buy market-rate units."

Underlying all of Phillpotts's construction work is a political agenda set by Governor Pataki's office. "Housing is one of the public-policy areas where, without spending a lot of public dollars, we can really change fundamentally the way Harlem operates. For the better," Phillpotts says. "If this and the other housing initiatives work as they should, it will have a transformative effect on Harlem for at least a generation. And probably several beyond."

Balton, for one, is ready for those effects. He's rented on West 127th Street for eight years. His voice, normally crisp and ebullient, turns weary recounting the degrading day-to-day hassles inflicted on Harlem's working, taxpaying middle class. "People in other parts of the city laugh when I get all worked up about a Duane Reade opening in my neighborhood," he says. "But chain drug stores, clothing stores, supermarkets are common anywhere else. I'm 45 years old. I'm ready to live in the real world, where you don't have to search to buy toilet paper."

"I don't buy the fact that we need to wait so that we get the 'right' people up here," says Anderson. "The right people are people who respect Harlem's integrity."

Al sharpton is always a tough act to follow. Inside the Apollo, at February's Democratic presidential debate, he lobbed the first question at Al Gore and Bill Bradley. The subject was straight out of the traditional black-activist playbook, about the police shooting of Amadou Diallo.

But the second, unfamiliar man to step to the mike had a query that revealed much about the mindset of Harlem's new generation: What, asked William Allen, did Gore and Bradley think of the fact that a minuscule 6 percent of Harlem's residents own their own homes, a rate that's less than a fifth of the citywide percentage and the lowest for any major black community in the country?

Gore and Bradley made sympathetic noises and quickly moved on. Allen, the banty young Democratic district leader for central Harlem -- and a renter -- is still pondering the problem two weeks later. "When you look at other communities, you find the central question regarding control of the community is ownership of the land," Allen says. "Look at Chinatown -- it's owned by Chinese-Americans. At Borough Park, it's Jewish Americans. But for some reason, Harlem, the mecca of black America, we're in the single digits for local real-estate ownership. It's a real issue." HPD says the figure is actually 10 percent -- but that still leaves Harlem at one third the citywide rate.

Allen's family has been in Harlem since the turn of the nineteenth century. In the seventies, when Allen was a teenager living on West 140th Street, one brother was killed in a drive-by shooting. "Growing up, I had this image of a glorious Harlem past, from listening to my grandparents' stories, and here my childhood was drugs and ugly stuff," Allen says. "All my friends who were going to college, if they went off to Morehouse or Spelman or Howard, they did not return. I couldn't wait to escape Harlem."

But a call from Allen's longtime pastor, the Reverend Preston Washington, pulled him back. "He said that if good people came together, a bad place could be made good again, and that he was getting the churches together to make a spiritual commitment. Then he sat down with David Dinkins, who said if he was elected mayor, he'd support them. Dinkins won, and he and Bill Lynch came up with a $200 million budget to revitalize a large section of Harlem called Bradhurst, from 139th to 155th Street, along Frederick Douglass Boulevard. If you were to see that strip before the early nineties -- shootings, no middle-class folks, and nobody, black or white, would walk down that street. You go there today, you see homeownership, you can see the sunlight going down the street. It's the most beautiful boulevard street in Harlem."

A copy of the self-help book It's About the Money!, written by the Jesse Jackson father-and-son team, is prominently displayed in Allen's apartment, and he endorses a similar version of capitalism as empowerment tool. But Allen is alarmed at how the state and city are allocating tens of millions of dollars. "If you're gonna use government money, it should not be to create market-rate housing," Allen says. "Government money is supposed to help the many -- not the few. Without a place for the middle class, this community becomes like an Upper East Side, where you have a lot of rich people and no one really involved in neighborhood issues."