City officials lowered zoning standards once black residents took over neighborhoods

Evidence

Although the freeway presented an obvious instance, public incursions occurred in less obvious ways as well. Typically, once blacks had “taken over” an Atlanta neighborhood, city officials automatically assumed that property values would plummet and the area would become a slum. Accordingly, planners and zoning committees lowered their standards for the region and began approving projects they would have routinely rejected if the residents were still white. After fighting to get into a neighborhood of single-family homes, middle-class black residents now saw cramped apartment complexes and commercial projects springing up nearby. “It’s awfully disgusting to pay inflated prices for homes in a residential section and as soon as you begin to get settled, here comes white ‘investors’ throwing up anything that will get by the inspectors,” complained one black Atlantan. “Juke joints and pool rooms will probably be next. Can’t we expect any type of protection from our city government?” — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 176

Categorization

• XREF: Links directly to this reader’s core theme of segregated ideology reinventing itself - city policy itself turned against black homeowners to deny them the protections whites took for granted. — connects to: Black entry into neighborhoods was wrongly believed to lower property values — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 1310; City neglect of black neighborhoods was misread by whites as black-caused decay — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 180; Early zoning bodies deliberately down-zoned black neighborhoods to industrial status — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 362 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Early zoning bodies deliberately down-zoned black neighborhoods to industrial status #expands (0.85) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 362
• City neglect of black neighborhoods was misread by whites as black-caused decay #qualifies (0.82) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 180
• Facially-neutral rezoning displaces black residents into blight and industrial exposure #exemplifies (0.80)
• Black entry into neighborhoods was wrongly believed to lower property values #corroborates (0.78) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1310
• Black homeowners deployed property-values rhetoric to win zoning protection #complicates (0.76) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 177
• City neglect, not black use, caused the decay of desegregated parks #qualifies (0.71) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 178