The Young Landlords

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism.

The setting of The Young Landlords is Harlem, New York, in the summer of 1979. This was a period of social ferment. Harlem was and remains a predominantly Black community. In the summer of 1979, as the narrator points out, there is only one white resident in the entire block where the narrative centers. Harlem had undergone dramatic changes in the decades leading up to 1979. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s featured a resurgence of Black music, literature, art, education, and cultural life. Historians point to the Harlem Renaissance as part of the impetus for the Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s. Divergent elements of the movement for equal rights, guided by leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, gathered, organized, and protested in Harlem.

Other forms of upheaval appeared in Harlem in the 1970s as the US economy struggled with fuel shortages and runaway inflation. Concerted efforts emerged around one particular issue during this decade: Many tenement landlords worked to force out long-term residents so they could have leeway to increase rents and convert rental properties to condominiums. State and municipal governments conflicted with one another as they struggled to pass laws to stabilize rent prices—even as landlords found constructive, devious ways of forcing residents out of their properties. The tenement situation described in The Young Landlords is unique only in that most of the authorities described, including the slumlord Harley, attempt to maintain acceptable rates and conditions for apartment residents. Walter Dean Myers expresses a prevalent social attitude in the first chapter when several adults confront the teens about their perceived lack of engagement. The adults say their own opportunities to make positive differences are over but the adolescents still have a chance to improve society, even though they are not taking it.