“There’s very little real estate speculation going on in Harlem right now,” a developer, Lewis Futterman, said at a symposium about Harlem real estate on Friday. “Ha!” a woman in the second row of the audience shouted. “There’s nothing but speculators running around up there.”

Undeterred, Mr. Futterman went on. “Some 95% of the home ownership is from user-buyers. And very little displacement is going on because the private development community has learned that there’s no advantage to moving people out,” he said. A man sitting in a middle row gave an angry retort, “Who’s he been talking to? Peter Pan?”

The idea of the all-day symposium, “Harlem in Our Eyes,” was to explore the “intersection of new development with the existing community,” with a few new developers up on the podium and representatives of the community participating from the audience. The intersection wasn’t always friendly. Indeed, the morning sessions at the conference – hosted by Baruch College’s Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute – aired many complaints from self-described artists, activists, and small retailers arguing that rejuvenation had wiped out Harlem’s cultural integrity. The owner of a crafts store complained about outside competition from “corporate big-box stores.” The filmmaker of a documentary, “The Changing Face of Harlem,” said Harlem residents had told her over and over that it was “better for us when people were afraid to come up here.”

No one pointed out the reason people were afraid to go to Harlem. It was incredibly dangerous as recently as 1990, when dozens of burglaries and felonious assaults happened every day. In 1990 Harlem had 243 murders, compared to 42 last year. Nearly all of this crime was black on black, and perpetrated against Harlem residents.

At the symposium last week, though, audience members conveyed a sense that something had been taken away from the neighborhood in the last few years. Another developer, Carlton Brown, said, “For those who complain, I could agree that the new Harlem is not what it ought to be. It’s far from, say, the days of the Harlem Renaissance, but things in many ways are much better than they once were.”

Mr. Futterman said there is an unproductive imprecision to many of the complaints. When confronted after his talk by a heckler about displacement, he demanded examples and addresses. “Tell me exactly where you’re talking about,” he said. “No generalities. Listen. You got CB 10 up there. If you had displacement going on, that community board would be on top of people like hawks on a chicken. No way it’s happening on any scale.”

Mr. Futterman’s tough talk comes from someone with a unique position in Harlem. As the co-founder of Uptown Partners, he is the developer of the Lenox, Harlem’s first large, fully market-rate apartment building in decades – built without government subsidies and on 100% private land. He and Joseph Holland, a real estate attorney who had worked in Harlem for 25 years, bought the development rights from Mount Calvary Church, which had run out of money while trying to build a new church in the 1980s.

“This is development without displacement,” Mr. Holland said. “Our site was a blight on the community, a well-known eyesore for over 20 years. It’s important in this phase of Harlem’s history that we look at a balanced development approach – that we have both market-rate and affordable housing.”

The Lenox is definitely market-rate. Its 77 apartments range from $490 a square foot for three-bedroom units to $668 a square foot for the penthouses with terraces. Of the 17 apartments priced at more than $1 million, five have been sold, even though occupancy is several months away. “We wanted the most upwardly mobile members of the Harlem community to stay,” Mr. Futterman told the Baruch audience. “And we wanted to attract back those who had left in the days when there was so much disinvestment in Harlem.”

Some audience members objected – “What about poor people?” one asked – but city policy has long sought to return Harlem to its original mixed income heritage.

“It would have been impossible to build the Lenox seven years ago when I first came to HPD,” said Deputy Commissioner Kimberly Hardy, who directs the Office of Community Partnership for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. “Now that HPD investment has resulted in a mixed-income community in Harlem, the private market has stepped in to build. Our job is done.” Or as Mr. Futterman pointed out, “There’s no question but that shallow subsidies paved the way for market-rate housing by bringing back the middle class, the salt-of-the-earth people like schoolteachers, cops, firemen, people who take an interest in their schools, who report crime, who pay attention to their neighborhood. We couldn’t be doing what we’re doing if the shallow subsidies hadn’t been there first.”

And despite an underlying hostility among those in the audience to market rate housing, Ms. Hardy’s statistics show that most of HPD’s $1.5 billion investment in Harlem since 1987 has both benefited poor people and given preference to neighborhood residents. Between January 1987 and December 2005, HPD completed the construction of 44,774 affordable housing units in Harlem Community Boards 9, 10, and 11 – or 19% of the citywide total. Of these, 7,454 or 22% are owned rather than rented, helping Harlem take a big leap to 16% home ownership in 2002, up from less than 2% in 1993. (Actual home ownership is probably closer to 20%, but the figures won’t be available until 2007.) More than 78% of HPD’s beneficiaries have been low income, 11% were moderate income, and 11% were middle income.

Further, Ms. Hardy noted that almost by definition HPD’s rehabilitation of 27,764 once highly dilapidated but occupied units caused no displacement because HPD policy returns the apartment to the original tenant.

A few people at the symposium wondered at the financial wisdom of market-rate investments in Harlem, particularly since the sales of new homes nationally in January fell 5% below sales in December. What would happen if the much-discussed, so-called bubble burst? Mr. Futterman said he wasn’t worried. “We’re coming into the good selling season now, and as long as the 10-year T bill stays below 5, interest rates will be low and the Harlem market will stay strong. If it gets to 5, it’s going to be plateau time.”

If plateau time happens, everyone will get a chance to sit back and consider whether what the filmmaker calls the “changing face of Harlem” is a good one.