Legal anti-discrimination shifted, not removed, the forces suppressing black home values.

Evidence

Ironically, this is a shift that took place after it became illegal to discriminate against black homebuyers. Remember, when the FHA explicitly endorsed and promoted all-white neighborhoods, black families actually paid more for their homes because they had so few options to choose from; the prices they paid increased surrounding property values. After the passage of the Fair Housing Act, supply could no longer be legally restricted, and more neighborhoods became available to black buyers. However, with explicit discrimination prohibited, another insidious factor remained: white preferences and fears, stoked by realtors and developers who wanted to drive out white homeowners and buy up their properties. When black families moved in, developers warned white families their property values would fall—and then, when they left and sold their homes at a loss, they did. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 209

Categorization

• CANDY: The self-fulfilling prophecy trope—developers warn values will fall, then whites sell at a loss and values actually do fall—is a compact, shareable story about how racial steering worked after 1968.