Blockbusting is the business process of US real estate agents and building developers to convince white property owners to sell their homes for a low price, which they do by raising fears to homeowners that racial minorities will soon move to the environment. The agents then sold the same house at a higher price to a desperate black family to escape the overcrowded ghettos. Blockbusting became possible after the legislative and judicial dismantling of legally protected racial real estate practices after World War II. In the 1980s it largely disappeared as a business practice, following changes in the law and real estate market. After the turn of the millennium, claims were made that a similar but upside-down practice occurred in New York State and New Jersey on behalf of orthodox Jews, who pressured non-Jews to sell on the basis of their fear of being outnumbered by Jews, and then resold at prices much higher to the Jews.
Video Blockbusting
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Beginning around 1910, more than one million black Americans from rural South America moved north to work in cities and towns in the northern US. The cities experienced a severe labor shortage due to World War I. This is known as the Great Migration. When US troops returned from Europe after World War I, scarce housing and jobs increased racial and class antagonisms across the city. Many white people regard blacks as a social and economic threat, and avenge their presence with local zoning laws. Such legislation requires them to live and live in geographically defined cities or towns, preventing them from moving into areas inhabited by whites.
In 1917, in the case of Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the United States Supreme Court overturned a racial labor law banning blacks from living in white environments. The Court ruled that the law violates the Fourteenth Amendment Protection Amendment Article of the United States Constitution. In turn, whites use racial bargaining agreements in deeds, and real estate businesses informally apply them to prevent the sale of homes to black Americans in white environments. To thwart the Supreme Court ban Buchanan v. Warley against such legal business racial, state courts interpret the agreement as a contract between private persons, outside the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Supreme Court ruled that the Amendment's Equal Protection Clause prohibits state law enforcement from racial barriers in state courts. In this event, decades of separation practices were canceled, forcing black Americans to live in overcrowded and overpriced slums. Freed by the Supreme Court from legal restrictions, it became possible to sell white housing to blacks. Real estate companies start selling homes to those who can buy, if they can find a willing white seller.
Generally, "blockbusting" demonstrates the business practices of real estate and building development that generate double benefits from US anti-black racism. Real estate companies are approaching white house owners to aggravate their fears of mixed race communities, to encourage them to quickly sell their homes for less than market prices. The companies then sell the property to black Americans at a price higher than the market price. With standard banking criteria for mortgage lending, blacks are usually not eligible for mortgages from banks and savings and credit associations. Instead, they were forced to install an installment contract above the market price to buy a home, a discriminatory economic strategy that often led to foreclosures. With blockbusting, the real estate company legally gets the first profit from arbitration (the difference between the discounted price paid to the feared white seller and the very high price paid by the black buyer), second from the commissions generated from the increase in real estate sales, and third of them higher than the home sales market financing to black Americans.
The documentary Revolution '67 (2007) examines the blockbusting practiced in Newark, New Jersey in the 1960s.
Maps Blockbusting
Method
The term "blockbusting" probably originates in Chicago, Illinois, where real estate companies and building developers use provocate agents. They were non-whites who were hired to deceive the white population in an environment to believe that blacks were moving into the neighborhood. Houses that become vacant in that way, allow the accelerated emigration of economically successful racial minorities into a better environment outside the ghetto. White villagers are encouraged to quickly sell (lose) and emigrate to generally more homogeneous suburbs. Blockbusting is most prevalent on the West Side and South Side of Chicago, and is also highly practiced in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City and in the West Oak Lane neighborhood of Northwest Philadelphia.
Tactics include:
- employs black women to be seen pushing strollers in a white environment, thereby encouraging the white fear of a devalued property
- hire black youths to fight on the street in front of a white house to evoke an unsafe atmosphere
- sell homes to black families in middle-class white environments to lure white flights, before community property drops dramatically
- selling the white house to a black family, and afterwards placing a property agent business card in a neighboring mailbox, and saturating the neighborhood with a flyer offering quick cash for homes
- developers buy houses and residential buildings, and leave them empty to make the environment seem abandoned - like a slum or slum
Such practices can be described as psychological manipulations that usually scare the remaining white citizens into selling with loss.
Blockbusting is very common and very profitable. For example, in 1962, when blockbusting has been practiced for about fifteen years, the city of Chicago has more than 100 real estate companies that average "change" two to three blocks a week for years.
Reaction
In 1962, "blockbusting" - Profiteering real estate - nationally affected by The Saturday Evening Post with the article "Confessions of a Block-Buster", in which the authors detail the practice, emphasized the benefits derived from people - a frightening white man for sale at a loss, in order to quickly settle in a racially segregated "better environment." In response to political pressure from deceived sellers and buyers, states and cities legally restrict door-to-door real estate demands, post signs of "FOR SALE", and government licensing agencies authorized to investigate buyer and seller complaints that are blockbusting , and revoke the blockbuster real estate sales license. Likewise, other state laws allow lawsuits against real estate companies and brokers who cheat buyers and sellers with fraudulent statements about property degradation, alter racial and ethnic populations, increase crime, and "deteriorate" schools, because racial mixing.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 establishes a federal cause of action against blockbusting, including illegal real estate brokers claims that blacks, Hispanics, et al. has or will move into the environment, and demotes property. The same Fair Housing and Opportunity Office is charged with managing and enforcing this law. In case of Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968), the US Supreme Court ruled that the Third Amendment allowed the federal government to prohibit racial discrimination in the private housing market. Therefore, it allows US law claims to cancel the usury contract (displaying more prices than mortgage houses and higher interest rates from the market), as a discriminatory real estate business practice illegally under the Civil Rights Act of 1866 , thus greatly reducing the profitability of blockbusting. However, legitimate regulatory and legal solutions to blockbusting are challenged in court; thus, cities can not prohibit the owners put a "SALE" sign in front of his house, to reduce blockbusting. In the case of Linmark Associates, Inc. v. Willingboro (1977), the Supreme Court ruled that the ban violates freedom of expression. Moreover, in the 1980s, when evidence of blockbusting practices disappeared, states and cities began re-establishing laws that restricted blockbusting.
Popular culture
Serial Serial TV series All In the Family (1971-1979), featuring "The Blockbuster", a 1971 episode of practice, illustrates some real estate blockbusting techniques.
In the 2011 historical fantasy novel Redwood and Wildfire author Andrea Hairston describes actors employed for blockbusting in Chicago, as well as a sense of betrayal experienced by others when they realize some blacks become rich by participating in this exploitative scheme.
See also
- Black flight
- inclusive zonation
- Institutional discrimination in the housing market
- Equal Housing Offices and Equal Opportunities
- Institutional racism
- Mortgage discrimination
- Reduction planned
- Racism
- Redlining
- Urban updates
- White flight
References
Further reading
- Orser, W. Edward. (1994) Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington: Kentucky Press University)
- Pietila, Antero. (2010) Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Is Establishing America's Great City (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee).
- Seligman, Amanda I. (2005) Block after Block: Environment and Public Policy at Chicago's West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
- Ouazad, Amine. (2015) Blockbusting: Brokers and Segregation Dynamics , Journal of Economic Theory, Volume 157, May 2015, Page 811-841.
External links
- http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/147.html
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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