Week 6 Post 2

 Week 6 Post 2- Formal Synthesis

 Blockbusting was an epidemic of real estate agents manipulating the market to make money while causing black people to be framed as the cause of housing values depreciating. The FHA claimed that black people moving into neighborhoods causes the value of homes in that neighborhood to go down. The FHA had no evidence to back up this claim, in fact, black families could sometimes raise property values since middle-class black families were charged more for homes in neighborhoods with middle-class white families than the white families were. The chapter explains blockbusting, a process in which realtors tried to scare white families into selling their houses by making it seem like their neighborhood was in danger of integrating. They did this by hiring black women to push baby carriages around, hiring black men to blast music from their cars and drive in the neighborhood, and hiring black families to go with real estate agents when they were showing properites. When they had scared the white families into selling, the real estate agents would lowball them with price and the families would get a fraction of what they paid for the house. The agents would then turn around and sell the same house to a black family for much more than they paid, but the neighborhoods value would go down since the houses were being sold for so little. These depreciating values were used as evidence by the FHA that black people drive property values down, even though they manufactured those values themselves through real estate agents. 

    Because black families were sold homes at such high prices and they could not receive FHA loans, it was very difficult for many of them to make payments on time. Some of them bought homes under contract, meaning they did not actually own the home for almost 20 to 25 years, and could be evicted with just one late rent payment. Black families began doing things like not paying for utilities, working double shifts at multiple jobs, and leasing rooms to tenants at inflated prices just to keep themselves from eviction. This led to overcrowded and unkempt black neighborhoods, which were used to stereotype black people as lazy and criminal. The FHA was the backbone of the organized racism, while simultaneasly claiming that black people were the cause of chaos and violence if integration was attempted.