Rothstein’s Levittown integration plan would self-sabotage via white flight

Evidence

Though a laudable effort, it fails to consider one key neighborhood attribute: white homeowners in Levittown live with a less than 1 percent black population, and they must be comfortable living with very few black neighbors—or they would live elsewhere. Rothstein’s proposal, which would bring more black neighbors in Levittown, would likely make it much less appealing to current and prospective white homeowners. Existing Levittown homeowners would put their homes on the market, and as the percentage of black homeowners increased, their home values would fall further. When the dust settled, black homeowners who purchased homes at reduced prices in order to get “instant” wealth would have much less of it because “too many” black homeowners moved in. Rothstein’s proposal ignores twenty-first-century systemic racism operating through the private decision-making of white homebuyers. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 483

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges Rothstein, connecting to his book ‘The Color of Law’ and the wider reparations/homeownership debate.