Blockbusting
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Part of a series of articles on Racial segregation |
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Blockbusting was a business process of U.S. real estate agents and building developers to convince white property owners to sell their house at low prices, which they did by promoting fear in those house owners that racial minorities would soon be moving into the neighborhood. The agents then sold those same houses at much higher prices to black families desperate to escape the overcrowded ghettos. Blockbusting became possible after the legislative and judicial dismantling of legally protected racially segregated real estate practices after World War II. By the 1980s it largely disappeared as a business practice, after changes in law and the real estate market. After the turn of the millennium, claims were made that a similar but inverse practice was occurring in New York State and New Jersey on behalf of orthodox Jews, who were pressuring non-Jews into selling based on the fear they will be outnumbered by Jews, and subsequently resold at a much higher price to Jews.
Starting around 1910, over a million black Americans from the rural Southern United States moved north to work in the cities and towns of the northern U.S.. Those cities had severe labor shortages due to World War I. This became known as the Great Migration. As U.S. soldiers returned from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, scarce housing and jobs heightened racial and class antagonisms across urban America. Many white people regarded black people as a social and economic threat, and countered their presence with local zoning laws. Such laws required them to live and reside in geographically defined areas of the town or city, preventing them from moving to areas inhabited by white people.
In 1917, in the case of Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court of the United States voided the racial residency statutes that were forbidding blacks from living in white neighborhoods. The court ruled that the statutes were violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In turn, whites used racially restrictive covenants in deeds, and real estate businesses informally applied them to prevent the selling 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 (1948) case, 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 black Americans to live in over-crowded and over-priced ghettos. Freed by the Supreme Court from the legal restrictions, it became possible to sell white housing to blacks. Real estate companies started selling houses to those who could buy, if they could find a willing white seller.
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