Blockbusting
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Blockbusting is a practice used mostly by real estate agents and developers to encourage white property owners to sell by giving the impression that minorities are moving in to the neighborhood.[1]
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[edit] Methods
First an agent or developer persuades white people to sell their houses at low prices by telling them that black people are moving into their neighborhood, exploiting their racism and fear of lowered property values. Then, the real-estate agent raises the price of the house and sells it to a black person.
The term may have originated in Chicago, where, in order to accelerate the out-migration of economically successful residents to better neighborhoods outside ghettos, people were hired to create a visual presence in the restricted neighborhoods, encouraging residents to sell their properties and move to still more restrictive suburbs. For example, black women were paid/encouraged to push baby carriages in exclusive white neighborhoods to encourage white residents to sell their properties, on the premise that property values would decline with an increase in the visible social differences that characterized neighboring ghettos.
In a variation, a real-estate agent would refer African-American families interested in buying a home to a particular neighborhood that, while mostly white, was less expensive than other neighborhoods. Even prosperous black families were steered to the targeted neighborhood. When a black family bought a house, the broker would then place business cards in the mailboxes of neighboring houses. A developer may also buy properties in a neighborhood and leave them empty, to give the neighborhood an empty feeling to encourage holdouts to sell to him.
Courts have ruled that towns cannot prohibit the placing of outdoor "for sale" signs by homeowners to reduce the effect of blockbusting. Linmark v. Willingboro, 431 US 85 (1977)], because doing so would infringe upon freedom of expression.
[edit] See also
- Inclusionary zoning
- Institutional racism
- Mortgage discrimination
- Planned shrinkage
- Racism
- Urban renewal
- White flight
- Black flight
[edit] References
- ^ The Suburban Racial Dilemma: Housing and Neighborhoods By William Dennis Keating. 1994. ISBN 1566391474
[edit] Further reading
- Orser, W. Edward. (1994) Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky)
- Seligman, Amanda I. (2005) Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
