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'Blockbusting' is a practice used mostly by real estate agents and developers to encourage property owners to sell by giving the impression that a neighborhood is changing.

Contents

Methods

Further reading

External links

See also

Methods

In this practice, an agent or developer convinces white people to sell their houses at low prices by telling them that people of color are moving into their neighborhood, exploiting their fear of lowered property values. Then, the real estate agent then raises the price of the house and sells it to a person of color.
The term may have originated in Chicago, where, in order to accommodate the out-migration of economically successful residents to better neighborhoods outside ghettos, people were hired to create a visual presence in the restricted neighborhoods, encouraging residents to sell their properties and move to still more restrictive suburbs. For example, black women were paid/encouraged to push baby carriages in exclusive white neighborhoods to encourage white residents to sell their properties, on the premise that property values would decline with an increase in the visible social differences that characterized neighboring ghettos.
A developer may buy properties in a neighborhood and leave them empty, to give the neighborhood an empty feeling to encourage holdouts to sell to him.
Courts have ruled that towns cannot prohibit the placing of outdoor "for sale" signs by homeowners to reduce the effect of blockbusting. Linmark v. Willingboro, 431 US 85 (1977)], because doing so would infringe upon freedom of expression.
Alternatively (and in contradiction to the preceding definition), "blockbusting" may refer to the practice whereby the perceived "exclusive" nature of neighborhoods with regard to a particular social group — particularly race — is broken down in order to encourage the sale of properties and subsequently in-migration of formerly excluded social groups.

Further reading

★ Orser, W. Edward. (1994) ''Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story'' (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky)

★ Seligman, Amanda I. (2005) ''Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

External links

★ http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/147.html

See also

★ Inclusionary zoning

★ Mortgage discrimination

★ Planned shrinkage

★ Racism

★ Urban renewal

★ White flight