Professional real-estate doctrine convinced white homeowners that black entry destroyed property values

Evidence

Thus, with real-estate officials—public and private, national and local—insisting that the “encroachment” of black buyers on all-white neighborhoods would assuredly depress property values, the white residents of Mozley Park and countless other neighborhoods across Atlanta accepted the idea without question. In truth, most of the Mozley Park properties were already quite modest. For instance, along Mozley Place, one of the streets closest to nearby black neighborhoods, stood simple wooden frame houses, usually just a single story high and situated on small land lots. Much of the housing had been built before the Depression, yet was still of a higher stock than blacks’ homes to the east. Unlike most of those shotgun shacks, all the homes on Mozley Place had running water and almost all had private baths. Much like the rest of the neighborhood, the residents there represented a mix of working-class and lower-middle-class whites. Two or three held white-collar positions as clerks or claims agents. Some served as foremen and managers at small businesses, such as a drapery shop or a tire company, while others worked as salesmen on the road or at retail stores like Sears, Roebuck. But the majority worked as skilled and semiskilled craftsmen, including a seamstress, a plumber, a bricklayer, a mechanic, a machine operator, a serviceman, a welder, and a pipe coverer. For the most part, they worked long hours at hard jobs. But most of them—forty out of forty-six—had saved enough money to purchase their own homes. Those homes were by far their largest investment, and their neighborhood a prized possession. All of the authorities in their lives insisted that the presence of blacks would destroy both. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s frame of desegregation pressure causing ideological retreat; also echoes the earlier blockbusting/steering scholarship (Hirsch, Sugrue) this book builds on. — connects to: Atlanta realtors formally obligated themselves not to sell to blacks in white areas — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 147; Black entry into neighborhoods was wrongly believed to lower property values — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 1310; Black homeowners deployed property-values rhetoric to win zoning protection — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 177 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Black entry into neighborhoods was wrongly believed to lower property values #corroborates (0.98) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1310
• Federal housing policy institutionalized the equation of black occupancy with falling property values #expands (0.92) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 144
• The real estate lobby fights reforms by stoking white homeowners’ fears of falling values. #expands (0.85) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1288
• Housing discrimination creates a negative feedback loop harming Black property values #expands (0.83) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 451
• Federal loan agencies institutionalized racial segregation as real-estate orthodoxy #corroborates (0.82) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 144
• White residents who could not remove a black neighbor instead sold and fled #exemplifies (0.80) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 150
• Black homeowners deployed property-values rhetoric to win zoning protection #qualifies (0.75) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 177