But weve all seen communities decline after minorities move in. How do you explain that phenomenon? One of the things about understanding racism is to understand it has a material reality. Were giving these story lines around those realities, so we have to sort of think about both the story line and the material reality. An example of that is housing value. Almost every person that I know, especially every white person I know, has a story about having grown up in an area that was very nice, and then blacks moved in and the housing value going down. So the story that gets told around that is when blacks move in, housing values go down. Thats confirmed by lived experience, and it gets retold over and over, so virtually every white person knows this story. What I want to suggest is that that story is true, but not for the reasons that the story suggests. Its not that blacks move in that causes the housing values to go down, its that whites leave. Instead of focusing on the white flight, they focus on the black entrance. But when whites leave, because blacks only represent about 4 percent of any housing market, it means you have a housing market in which 96 percent of the market isnt interested, and that causes values to plummet immediately. But its the white flight thats causing housing values to plummet, not blacks moving in. Now, there have been a few communities, including Oak Park, outside of Chicago, where they watched this phenomena of blacks starting to move in. Oak Park is a liberal community that fought for the civil rights movement. In the late 60s, when blacks started to move in, the residents said, you know what, this is all the equity we have. This is all the wealth that we have. Im concerned that housing values are going to go down. I know that same story. But its not because were afraid of living next to black people, we just dont want to lose our wealth. So what the city did was insure the value of the houses - up to 85 percent of market value - so whites wouldnt feel forced to leave. That was about 35-40 years ago. They havent paid one casualty and it remains a very vibrant, integrated community, because whites didnt flee. So thats the phenomenon - that white flight is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. By leaving a neighborhood and refusing to stay where blacks are, that causes housing values to go down, rather than the black presence itself.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 01:16:31 +0000
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