A guest post by commenter Jefe:
Blockbusting (1910s – 1980s) was a common real estate practice throughout the 20th century in the United States. It was used to profit from and enforce racial segregation in housing, reaching a peak between 1948 and 1971. Prior to 1948, it was more common to use restrictive covenants to enforce segregated residential patterns. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled (Shelley v Kraemer ) that lower courts could not enforce restrictive covenants on real estate. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 invalidated the practice of blockbusting, but it continued until the 1980s. Some cities tried to break blockbusting by making it unlawful to place “For Sale” signs in front of houses, but the Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that that violated freedom of expression.
Blockbusting refers to:
The practice of frightening homeowners by telling them that members of a particular race, religion, or national origin are moving into their neighborhood and that they should expect a decline in the value of their property or an increase in crime. Homeowners sell at deflated prices and properties are then resold at inflated prices.
Blockbusting became widespread following the two Great Migrations (1910 – 1930 and 1940-1970) when increasing numbers of African-Americans moved outside the Deep South. The demand for housing outstripped the supply in crowded ghettos. Also, more non-whites started to earn higher wages and wanted to move into middle-class neighborhoods. Previous restrictive covenants and land zoning had created highly segregated residential patterns which made it very difficult to open up housing to prospective residents.
Some black residential suburbs were built to satisfy this need. However, this required land to be made available to build houses for non-whites and lending institutions to relax their redlining practices (of not lending to non-whites). Supply remained limited.
The other, more profitable, option was to convert a nearby white neighborhood into a non-white one by blockbusting.
S0me blockbusting methods:
- Hiring blacks to walk through a neighborhood pretending that they live there (eg, having a woman push a baby carriage down the street in full view of all the neighbors) and then flooding the neighborhood’s mailboxes with warnings that non-whites were moving in and offering quick cash.
- Convince a single or small number of homeowners to sell their houses to non-whites at a slightly inflated price, after which the remaining residents were scared into selling at depressed prices.
- Leave buildings in the neighborhood abandoned. In turn, houses would be sold to black families at inflated prices, often made possible by predator lending methods. The white families could be sold a more expensive house in another neighborhood that had not yet been blockbusted. Real estate agents raked the money in.
- Conversion of rental properties could be sped up by raising rents to unaffordable levels (say, by making an inconsequential improvement), forcing the residents to move out quickly.
- Rezone the school district with nearby black neighborhoods so that white students were suddenly forced to attend majority black schools.
Blockbusting became rare by the 1980s, but the effect was continued by the practice of Racial Steering, and reinforced through Redlining and Subprime Mortgage or other Predatory Lending.
Reference: Encyclopedia of Chicago.
See also:
- Anacostia
- White Flight
- Black Ghetto
- Racial Steering
- Redlining
- The Great Migration
- Restrictive Covenants
- Sundown Towns
- Black Middle Class
- Videos
- Episode of All in the Family “The Blockbuster” where Archie Bunker is tempted to sell his house to a blockbuster:
The interesting thing about this practice was that it only worked because of white paranoia about living among black people. The sad reality was that blockbusters found it all too easy to engage in this practice because that paranoia was so profound and so universal. It was used across the nation in post-WWII America. If there is a need for “proof” of the depth of white racism in the US during that era, the easy success of the practice of blockbusting is it.
As Agabond note, until SOTUS made the practice illegal, use of racial covenants was also ubiquitous during this era. In fact, the first developer of suburbs, Mr. Levitt (of Levittown), used restrictive covenants in all of his developments. He was not secretive about this. To the contrary, it was one of his big marketing tools, assuring white buyers that they would not face the risk of having black neighbors.
Returning WWII soldiers were offered a stipend to help them purchase a home. The social engineering behind this was to create an American middle class and capitalize on the momentum of the giant heavy manufacturing industry that was created during the war. However, the money was restricted for the purchase of a new home. For most GI’s, this meant a home in one of the nascent suburbs, like Levittown. However, since most of those suburbs had restrictive covenants in place, as a pracical matter this benefit was available only to white soldiers. In this way, taxpayer dollars were used to create net wealth in white families, but not black families.
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@ Blanc2
I did not write this post. It is a guest post by Jefe.
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Great post, Jefe. This belongs in the “things I never learned in history” department.
I would love to see more posts on how economics, environment, gentrification, redlining and some of the other silent or invisible purveyors of racism have historically impacted, and continue to negatively affect people of color in this supposedly “post racial” world.
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@ Jefe
Well done! This post piggy backs Abagond’s revealing essay on SunDown Towns.
@ Peanut
Even though I understand your sentiment, what you refer to as “truly sick” is relatively bland compared to other VIOLENT aspects of systemic white supremacy/racism that whiteness has visited upon blacks in the US: secret experiments, drug/disease testing, bombing an all black town, race riots to maintain the zero-sum subjugation/oppression of blacks, enslaving black americans even after slavery was supposedly over, destroying black businesses via “on and off hwy ramps” deliberately orchestrated to decimate black communities and their vital economic centers, bombing and burning churches, unequal law enforcement and much more.
Which is why I keep repeating: if whiteness is anything, it’s DEMONIC!
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@Peanut
It doesn’t have to be a woman pushing a baby carriage through a neighborhood. It could be a family playing with their kids in the street, or someone asking to borrow a garden tool or cooking ingredient or asking where the school bus stop is or what day the garbage is collected or if they can recommend a plumber – anything to make it appear that the person lived there or just moved in. A black real estate agent could pretend to do any of those things without having to hire anyone.
The other methods were just as sordid, just like the one in the All in the Family episode.
Also, blockbusting only really worked OUTSIDE the Deep South, and was fueled by the large increase in demand for housing and the fear that the neighborhood would “go” quickly. In the South, the towns were actually being emptied out of population, and the police would round up any black person they found in the other side of town at an inappropriate hour anyway. White residents in the South did not have to fear that blacks would be moving into their neighborhoods like they did in the North.
Both blacks and working class / ethnic whites suffered from blockbusting. Whether or not the fear was irrational, the housing values did drop off suddenly and quickly, followed by a decline in city services and police protection, as well as in the quality of the schools. The effects were very real.
It is funny how people capitalize on fear to make a quick buck. If you think about it, you can find many examples.
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Nice post and very informative.
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This is so loathsome on so many levels. In hindsight, I think this is what happened to our once nicely racially integrated section of Compton which my parents bought into in the 1970s. My parents were friends with the middle-class Black families that were moving in in large numbers, and they only waited until property values had plummeted and they’d lost their shirts that they finally decided that they needed to move out of the neighborhood (to Orange County).
I had always thought it was because of redlining alone, but I guess blockbusting may have played a role (fhe pattern described here fits the narrative that I’d longed heard). I was far too young to know anything about this, though.
This is one of those rare cases where egregious racism tangibly and demonstrably harms the majority population as well. (The existence of a racist society is bad even for most of the members of the empowered majority population as well, but in ways that are difficult to quantify and prove in a way that would convince them.)
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@kushibo
It did affect working class and middle class whites. Wealthy whites were largely unscathed, or even made money on the situation.
So, for me, this is a perfect example where the interests of the working class whites are not aligned with the wealthy. Can they not see how aligning with the wealthy is against their class interests?
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@Kiwi,
Are you sure that the neighborhoods in Cupertino were blockbusted (ie, real estate agents get white residents to sell and vacate their houses quickly and block by block to meet the demand of Asian residents that are in need of housing)? or a case of Racial steering? Blockbusting is illegal, and real estate agents are not allowed to intimidate residents into selling their houses.
It would be more believable that blockbusting was involved if a 95% white neighborhood became majority Asian (60-70%) in the span of a couple years or less. The main effect of blockbusting is to maintain segregated neighborhoods and to make money doing so. Are there neighborhoods in Cupertino that became 90% Asian largely by the efforts of real estate agents to force whites to sell?
Racial Steering is technically illegal, but that is so much harder to prove. Sounds like Asians might be steered to Cupertino. But if any white resident is indeed intimidated into selling their house by real estate agents, then they should consider filing a complaint with the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
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@ Kiwi
It could be perhaps they fear having their kids being out shinned by an Asian.
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@ Kiwi
Yup. Racists will always find a reason not to like you. If it is not one thing, it is another.
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@ Kiwi
Same here, just replace “Asian” with “black”.
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@ Blanc2
Excellent point.
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Racial Steering is technically not legal, and real estate agents know that, but it continues unabated. How else do we explain the proliferation of middle class neighborhoods which are over 80% black or 80% Asian? And the white people still left tend to be the older ones who moved there many decades ago. A neighborhood that is 80% black is probably 90% black for the people under age 40.
The only time I see a middle-class neighborhood that is around, say, 40-45% black & 40-50% white is when it is “in transition”, ie, converting to a black neighborhood, or gentrifying. It does not stay in that range for more than a few years. Racial steering does not work as fast and does not provide the same quick buck as blockbusting, but it seems to achieve the similar goals.
Predatory lending also contributed. Why would they be offered a low interest loan in a neighborhood geared for investors to make a quick buck and then sell off the mortgage to unsuspecting CMO investors? They could be offered predatory loans for houses only in certain neighborhoods.
Does no one here remember blockbusting when it was still in its heyday?
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And of course, when a white person moves into a Black neighborhood its “GENTRIFICATION”. Because, you know, rising property vaiues and new businesses besides Chinese nail salons and check cashing agencies and community gardens and sweeping the street and calling the cops on the drug dealers is so horrible. Black people’s problems are exclusively caused by the presence and absence of white people.
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@ Jay from Philly
Blacks can gentrify as well. It’s an economic thing, not necessarily racial. A recent university study identified several majority black neighborhoods being gentrified by mostly black people.
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Jay from Philly:
Were you on vacation from the jail? Good ol Jay, our most comical and favourite ‘raciss’! Folks, this guy can’t be taken seriously! Mock him.
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This is 100 percent true. I suspect (but can’t prove) this is still happening. A few years back (around 2006 or so) a crooked mortgage broker somehow got a hold of the house next door to my friend’s house. He promptly placed a black drug dealer, a white “muscle” that just stood outside glaring at people, two white prostitutes and two pit bull terriers into this home. We also started seeing cars at all hours, and drug baggies around. Finally four teens were parked across from the house smoking weed. My friend’s screen was jimmied open too.
One family took the bait and bailed, the rest of them fought and waited for the cops to do their jobs and arrest (and convict!) every single person in the house. I think the broker also got in trouble. He was the slimiest of the bunch. This is not a joke,.
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Just found this documentation video about Levitttown, Pennsylvania about one black family moving in the community of 60,000 in 1958. This town was built by the same people who built Levitttown, NY and Bowie, MD.
(http://youtu.be/OClYPCYAf7s)
Just interesting to see how people thought in 1958.
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