TIL about Blockbusting, a method used during the "white flight" era, where real-estate agents would fake a black person moving into a white neighborhood to scare the rest of the residents into hastily selling their houses at a loss. They then charged high prices selling the houses to black families

VCUBNFO · 12時間前

The tactics included hiring black women to be seen pushing baby carriages in white neighborhoods

... wow

EDIT: Shameless plug for an amazing HBO miniseries about housing segregation and public housing. It's based off real events that happened in Yonkers, New York.

peetie_p · 10時間前

After attracting both national media attention and government scrutiny, "Blockbusters" were eventually forced to abandon the practice and resigned themselves to running a video rental franchise.

toeofcamell · 12時間前

Racial steering refers to the practice in which real estate brokers guide prospective home buyers towards or away from certain neighborhoods based on their race. Racial steering is often divided into two broad classes of conduct; 1.Advising customers to purchase homes in particular neighborhoods on the basis of race 2.Failing, on the basis of race, to show, or to inform buyers of homes that meet their specifications

In the United States, redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance,[2] other services such as health care [3] or even supermarkets,[4] can be denied to residents to carry out redlining.[5] The term "redlining" was coined in the late 1960s by John McKnight, a sociologist and community activist.[6] It refers to the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest; later the term was applied to discrimination against a particular group of people (usually by race or sex) irrespective of geography.

more fun real estate sleaze ball tactics: http://www.chicagonow.com/getting-real/2011/08/11-of-the-sleaziest-real-estate-practices/

VigodaLives · 8時間前

This American Life, in conjunction with ProPublica, explored this practice, its roots in federal government policies in the '30s, the devastating effect it had on neighborhoods, efforts by Mitt Romney's dad to stop it, how he was thwarted by Richard Nixon and the long-lasting impacts it's had to today. It's really shocking, and one of the best, most informative hours of radio you can listen to.

-7FORTY2- · 10時間前

There's an episode of 'All In The Family' about this.

wildcatsnbacon · 7時間前

Howard Stern has described this happening where he grew up in Roosevelt, NY.

Cr3X1eUZ · 11時間前

Keep the Poors and the Almost Poors fighting, to distract away from the people who are actually fucking them over.

trexrocks · 10時間前

Blockbusting was most prevalent on the West Side and South Side of Chicago.

This and other tactics is why Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in America. Segregation map

nshaffer4 · 7時間前

My great-grandmother did something similar to this. She built and sold houses for a living. A white man, who lived on the same street, wanted to buy one of her houses for less than her asking price of $40,000, so she paid a black couple to look at the house one day. After seeing the black couple tour the house and thinking they were going to buy the house, the man suddenly had an offer higher than $40,000 to show he could pay more than the black family.

wstrngnnt · 8時間前

So you watched "King of the hill" today on cartoon network also.

steamboat_willy · 8時間前

I've often wondered how you might play a chaotic neutral character...

yes_its_him · 11時間前

Thanks for clearing that up. I thought it referred to having an empty former video rental store in every strip mall.

BUSean · 7時間前

"This sounds terrible, and I'm glad I don't live in a time like that," he said, moving to another thread to upvote a joke about black people.

Phathom · 7時間前

TIL this is still happening now, especially in Chicago. The projects were known to do this. Now they are rich white home condos!

CylonbabyLiam · 7時間前

Couple this with redlining, and you have systematic economic segregation!

thegreatgazoo · 4時間前

It happened to my grandparents. They lived in an all white neighborhood on the north side of St Louis near 70 and McArthur. They were offered something like double for their house but liked the house so they didn't take it.

Long story short when they got to the point where they couldn't take care of the house anymore, they were one of 3 white families left. The property values had plunged and they were one of the few houses that hadn't been robbed (frankly they didn't have much to steal). They then moved close to where Michael Brown was shot, which was another poor but mostly white area at the time (mid 70s).

Even today real estate agents in St Louis only show houses on the north side to black residents and the white people who live there are running out to St Charles. My parents lived in far north county and their neighborhood had a few houses that were rented to section 8 renters and they were trashed pretty quickly, which takes down the rest of the property values. The gay couple with the nicest house was chased out because of crap written on their garage door. It basically went bad in a year or two.

bold_facts · 1時間前

White flight is still a thing.

blomqv · 7時間前

And then the whole community blamed all of it on black people.

mattkrueg · 11時間前

This tactic is still used, by the way.

LOHare · 7時間前

Sounds like a solid American capitalist story.

People are racist... how can we make money off of this?

magicalraven · 7時間前

So basically this...

tintinreddits · 6時間前

TIL black people moving into a neighborhood is a good way to rid all of the white people of a neighborhood.

is_it_fun · 2時間前

When a black family moves in somewhere, even to this day, some non-black neighbors get weirded out. Real estate agents smell blood and capitalize on it.

mandiblebutt · 1時間前

Oak Park Illinois is a suburb just west of Chicago. Kinda fancy, home of Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright Studios.

Just east of Oak Park is Chicago's Austin Neighborhood. During the 50s and 60s Austin went from a white ethnic enclave to almost all African American. Oak Park did not want that to happen.

Oak Park banned real estate signs and adopted a "black a block" strategy. Literally, only one house on each block could be sold to black folks.

Oak Park calls herself desegregated to this day.

Next town west is River Forest. African Americans could not live there, period. Realtors were not allowed to show houses to black folks. Tony Accardo, the head of the Chicago Outfit, lived in River Forest.

John_Barlycorn · 1時間前

When we were looking for a house about 10 years ago, we walked into a house and there was this great... I mean, really really well done... photo of the previous owners when they were young (1940/50s maybe) with the wife getting a piggy back ride on some boardwalk somewhere. It was a really impressive photo, poster size, and I stood there stairing at it, impressed for a while. Our Realtor took my pause to mean the wrong thing and said "Don't worry, they're the last Jews in the neighborhood."

Talk about cold water in your face. I just glared at him and walked out. Honestly, I don't even know how you can tell if someones Jewish just by looking at a 60yr old picture.

socsa · 45分前

Holy. Fuck. ITT: reddit excuses racism.

jrm2007 · 6時間前

Related to this were covenants for homeowners associations that made them promise not to rent orsell to non-Wasps or at least not to Jews in addition to Blacks and probably Asians. These were in place in La Jolla as late as the 1960s when the new UC needed to provide housing for faculty and so these rules were overturned.

The USA was not so different from nazi Germany -- a difference of degree but not kind. Different leadership in the USA could have led to a more nazi-like nation. Roth writes about this in his pretty good (what the fuck do I know, maybe great) book set in an America where Lindbergh gets elected.

I keep posting and getting shot down for expressing the idea that our treatment of Blacks in the USA made the treatment of Jews in Germany less shocking to us (to those of us who didn't already think it was a good idea) and maybe that led, no kidding, to the Holocaust of non-Aryans and others the nazis found disagreeable.

You can't do what we did to Blacks and Asians and Indians in the USA and think that has no connection to what happened during WW2. Why is that so crazy of an idea?

hbgk10 · 9時間前

Real estate brokers - sleazeball egomaniacs. This surprises me not at all.

cyberslammer · 11時間前

White flight era? It never ended.

nintrader · 6時間前

Well then, I'm certainly glad Blockbusters went out of business.

RossD123 · 7時間前

Thats freaking genius. Totally morally wrong and horrible, but genius.

ahh capitalism

growls · 7時間前

Do blacks actually lower property values by just living in a neighborhood?

Very recently a black family moved in down the street and my Asian neighbor said "there goes our property values." I think he was joking but I r heard people say that before but never asked if there was really a correlation.

So, is it true? Are people still that backwards?

todayilearned

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