When a ‘For Sale’ sign appeared on the window of a bungalow on Chicago’s West Side, the all-white neighbors feared one thing: Would a Black family move in?
Soon, one settled in the bungalow, and almost overnight, the white families all sold their homes, whether they could afford to or not. The Saturday Evening Post published this story in July 1962, in the article Confessions of a Block-Buster. It detailed the practice in which real-estate speculators moved Black families into all-white neighborhoods.
“I make my money — quite a lot of it, incidentally — in three ways: (1) By beating down the prices I pay the white owners by stimulating their fear of what is to come; (2) by selling to the eager Negroes at inflated prices; and (3) by financing these purchases at what amounts to a very high rate of interest,” Norris Vitchek, the pseudonym of an anonymous Chicago speculator, told the Post.
Block-busting led to the large-scale migration of whites to the suburbs known as White Flight. By playing off the fears that racial minorities make neighborhoods more dangerous and disorderly, White Flight decimated rust belt cities like Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee as whites took employment opportunities and generational wealth with them…