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Comment by telotortium | Hacker News Reader

That's not to say that racism played no role - of course there were racists at the time, and it probably played a role in influencing the decision to move. But without the rising crime rates in the 1960s and 1970s, I don't that wouldn't have been enough to lead to large-scale abandonment of neighborhoods these racists had lived in for generations.

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You're wrong, there was a large financial incentive to abandon neighborhoods once non-whites started living there. The racism caused housing sell-offs, amplified by the crashing home prices. People quickly learned that their home value would plummet when the neighborhood became integrated, so they rushed to be the first ones out; while values where still high. This, of course, exacerbated the problem. Racism is at least a good 70 to 90 percent of the problem.

Racism in part but even looking at redlining it isn't how it is portrayed. Redline documents would point out not only where clusters of blacks lived but also Jews, Polish, Italians, Irish, poor whites, etc. And those regions were all difficult to get loans to buy because the homes were often older and the banks were pretty sure that the working and lower class people living in them would not be able to afford upkeep. So they didn't want to lend money to buyers of homes that were likely to decrease in value. There was no Federal guarantee in those days.

Racism played a part too of course but class is often completely ignored in the USA.

One thing I've learned is redlining also meant that if a black, Mexican, or Asian family moved onto your street no one else on the block could get a home loan. Which meant you couldn't refinance, get a second mortgage. And if you sold it would have to be to a cash buyer.

See also block busting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

It really had little to do with who moved in - although to be sure people certainly wouldn't sell to certain types of people in certain places. Properties were rated by their quality and their potential of being renovated and kept up - that's what red lining actually was. I've read through red lining documents and they mentioned all types of ethnic groups on the side, but the main consideration was the quality of the properties and if the area would sustain or decline due to the ability of current and future owners to renovate the structures.

Many properties in areas that were claimed to be "block busted" by revisionists were of low build quality to begin with were aging out and were unlikely to be revitalized by whoever lived there in the future. As I mentioned, because of the depression and WW2 there were not many new things being built and the existing stock in many of these areas was already low quality to begin with and had gone decades without much investment. Therefore the demand was low for these properties and lower class people were the market for them. So the neighborhood began to change and more crime was brought into these places which only accelerated the plummeting of values.

People act like an area of affluent people living in high quality homes all ran for the hills as soon as a black family moved in and the prices plummeted. No, it was places like the south side of Chicago which were always working class and full of small, cramped living places. Building huge housing project towers in these areas didn't help either, nor did the highway systems that cut through these areas. But people got out because the living conditions sucked compared to what was available in the new suburbs being built. Not to mentioned, jobs were moving out of cities because business could expand to new locations that were safer and not cramped.

Did race play role? Sure. As did class to a greater extent. But the narrative you hear and accepted as fact just doesn't reflect the total reality.

No. Drive through Austin right now on Google Maps. The houses are huge, the streets are gorgeous, and the neighborhood went from majority white to 90+% Black in the span of just 10 years.

My understanding is that a lot of black East Austinites moved out to Manor because of house prices.

The Washington Park subdivision where redlining was eventually shot down was a brand new prosperous subdivision. The black families moving into it were well off.

The first person to integrate that neighborhood was a banking magnate. They bombed his house. Five times. They bombed banks and real estate agents who sold or lent to blacks.

Racial covenants were popularized as the more progressive way to keep neighborhoods segregated because racial violence was so bad.

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