Some were from companies with information on shopping, travel and sales, offering body and foot massage, help with finding a lover, help with homework, house-cleaning, secondhand goods and weather forecasts.
Beth Cooper Lawrence, the architect who designs Mr. Cross's Homework houses in Manhattan, said she virtually had to design some houses twice because buyers changed plans midstream.
For Ms. Gwinn and others, buying a HomeWorks house was a life-changing event, quite apart from their financial gains.
After living in a HomeWorks house on West 132nd Street for only two years, the owner resold it last year for $1.34 million, according to city records.
In 2003, Terry C. Lane, a real estate investor and former investment banker, completed the purchase of a five-story 21-foot-wide HomeWorks house on Lenox Avenue for $529,000.
Neill Coleman, a spokesman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said there was no conflict of interest in the sale of a HomeWorks house to Mr. Lane because the empowerment zone played no role in the HomeWorks program.
The value of having a HomeWorks house became clear when the apartment buildings and surrounding town houses on Ms. Jones's block lost power during a localized brownout and power failure.
City officials said Mr. Lane may have had an advantage in buying a HomeWorks house because he qualified as a Harlem resident and because the HomeWorks developer from whom he bought the house was required to sell at least 30percentt of the buildings to local residents.
"These people came in and won the lottery," said Robert Walters, a lawyer who represented some of the buyers of HomeWorks houses.
You can't get this at Home Depot.'''' Owners who resell HomeWorks houses usually have to pay back a part of the city subsidy at the time of the closing, depending on how long they have owned the house.
It is too early to judge the resale value of the Homeworks houses -- owners must occupy them for six years or refund the city subsidy -- but it seems clear that those in Harlem are more than a sound investment.
