Жылжымайтын мүлік пайдасы үшін нәсілшілдік көзқарастарды манипуляциялау

Manipulation of racist attitudes for real estate profit

Blockbusting is a business practice in the United States in which real estate agents and building developers convinced residents in a particular area to sell their property at below market prices. This was achieved by fearmongering the homeowners, telling them that racial minorities would soon be moving into their neighborhoods. The blockbusters would then sell those same houses at inflated prices to black families seeking upward mobility. Blockbusting became prominent after post World War II bans on explicitly segregationist real estate practices. By the 1980s it had mostly disappeared in the United States after changes to the law and real estate market.

From 1900–1970, around 6 million African Americans from the rural Southern United States moved to industrial and urban cities in the Northern and Western United States during the Great Migration in an effort to avoid the Jim Crow laws, violence, bigotry, and limited opportunities of the South. Resettlement to these cities peaked during World War I and World War II as slowing immigration from Europe created a labor shortage in northern and western cities. To fill war industries and shipyards, these cities recruited tens of thousands of blacks and whites including those from the South. Resistance to this loss of cheap labor in the South meant that northern recruiters had to act in secret or face fines or imprisonment. Southern authorities tried to prevent black flight by arresting migrants at railroad stations and arresting them on the grounds of vagrancy. Racial and class antagonisms heightened across the urban United States as a result of this influx of black residents, and in part owing to the overcrowding of cities. The Great Migration highlighted racial divisions of the North that black Americans so desperately tried to flee from in the South: police killings of unarmed African American men and inequalities and biases in employment, housing, health care, and education. As black soldiers returned home in the aftermath of World War I and World War II, they struggled to find adequate housing and jobs in the cities that they had left. They were confined to the most decrepit and oldest housing stock in the least desirable yet most densely populated areas. The areas that non whites were allowed to live in were substandard. This was in part because of the overcrowding, which was exacerbated by the Great Migration. Often, several families were crowded into one unit. Because non whites were confined to these small areas of the city, landlords were able to exploit their residents by charging high rents and ignoring repairs. In addition to being refused equal access to the housing market, blacks were relegated to the lowest paying, more dangerous jobs as well as being barred from joining many unions. Some companies would only hire these returning veterans and other black workers as strikebreakers, widening the divide between black and white workers further. Housing in the United States had been segregated for a long time historically, this was not a new idea or reality. In an attempt to continue the path of racial segregation in housing, white homeowners in many U. S. cities regarded blacks as a social and economic threat to their neighborhoods and to maintaining racial homogeneity. Groups of black people would have to join forces and combine income to buy a residency, in turn when they sold their house, it would become cheaper and other black groups could then afford housing. Redlining also made it difficult to afford housing in good areas, which had a direct link to poor education. However, whites found a loophole in this case by using racially restrictive covenants in deeds, and real estate businesses informally applied them to prevent the sale of houses to black Americans in white neighborhoods. To thwart the Supreme Court's Buchanan v. Warley prohibition of such legal business racism, state courts interpreted the covenants as a contract between private persons, outside the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, in the Shelley v. Kraemer case in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that the amendment's Equal Protection Clause outlawed the states' legal enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in state courts. In this event, decades of segregation practices were annulled, which had compelled blacks to live in overcrowded and over priced ghettos. Freed by the Supreme Court from the legal restrictions, it became possible for non whites to buy homes that had previously been reserved for white residents. Generally, "blockbusting" denotes the real estate and building development business practices which both profit and are fueled by anti black racism. Real estate companies used deceitful tactics to make white homeowners think that their neighborhoods were being "invaded" by non white residents, which in turn would encourage them to quickly sell their houses at below market prices. The companies then sold that property to blacks who were desperate to escape inner city ghettos at higher than market prices. Owing to redlining, African Americans usually did not qualify for mortgages from banks and savings and loan associations. Instead, they resorted to land installment contracts at above market rates to buy a house. Land installment contracts were historically predatory agreements in which buyers made payments directly to sellers over a period of time in order to obtain the legal title to the home only when the full purchase price had been paid. The harsh terms of these contracts and inflated prices often led to foreclosure, so these houses had a high turnover rate. With blockbusting, real estate companies legally profited from the arbitrage, the difference between the discounted price paid to frightened white sellers and the artificially high price paid by black buyers whose houses were often foreclosed on as a result of these unfair contracts. They also profited from the commissions resulting from increased real estate sales and their higher than market financing of house sales to blacks. After these white homeowners hurriedly sold their homes, middle class African Americans were then offered admittance into white neighborhoods that had previously been denied to them at artificially inflated prices. Given the lack of housing options available to black buyers, many had no choice but to pay these exorbitant costs. Blockbusting was very common and profitable. For example, by 1962, when blockbusting had been a common practice for some fifteen years, the city of Chicago had more than 100 real estate companies that had been, on average, "changing" two to three blocks a week. It thereby allowed black American legal claims to rescind the usurious land contracts (featuring over priced houses and higher than market mortgage interest rates), as a discriminatory real estate business practice illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1866, thus greatly reducing the profitability of blockbusting. Nevertheless, these regulatory and statutory remedies against blockbusting were challenged in court. As a result, it was decided that towns cannot prohibit an owner from placing a "FOR SALE" sign before their house, even if prohibiting this practice reduces blockbusting. In the case of Linmark Associates, Inc. v. Willingboro (1977), the Supreme Court ruled that such prohibitions infringed on the freedom of expression. Moreover, by the 1980s, as evidence of blockbusting practices disappeared, states and cities began rescinding statutes restricting blockbusting. One of the long term consequences of blockbusting was the onset of white flight and artificial demand for white only suburbs. Blockbusting engineered pre emptive white flight from city neighborhoods and steered Black residents with less free income and opportunities into the vacancies, thereby self fulfilling its own prophecies and justifying white flight post facto. White flight significantly decreased cities’ municipal tax revenues and impeded cities' ability to provide minority residents, who were often prevented from fleeing to the suburbs alongside their white peers, with adequate civil services. This was coupled with increased tax rates that city governments imposed on said residents, who were often forced to remain in the city due to discriminatory government and private industry practices, in an attempt to try and make up for the reductions in the tax base caused by white flight, further exacerbating the precarious social and financial positions imposed upon non white city residents. The serious comic television series All in the Family (1971–1979) featured "The Blockbuster", a 1971 episode about the practice, illustrating some real estate blockbusting techniques. In the 2011 historical fantasy novel Redwood and Wildfire, author Andrea Hairston depicts actors being hired for blockbusting in Chicago, as well as the sense of betrayal experienced by others when they realized some black people were getting rich by participating in these exploitative schemes. The 2014 documentary Spanish Lake describes how blockbusting happened in the St Louis suburb of Spanish Lake, Missouri. Blockbusting is portrayed in the 2021 Amazon Video series Them. In the American sitcom The Wonder Years (2021), the episode "Blockbusting" explicitly talks about the phenomenon.