Re:Why don't black and white Americans live together?
by whamlastxmas on Friday September 23, 2016 @11:01AM
(#12565114)
The part that seems flawed to me is that some racial groups are statistically much less likely to be high income earners. As prices increase tremendously, like you said happened here, you're going to be pushing out these racial groups. It seems like this is an experiment in creating gentrification and displacing disadvantaged minority groups.
1. Provide cheap insurance to homeowners against price declines, so that they would not fear the neighborhood flipping to African American and losing their investment.
2. Creating the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a essentially a non-profit real estate agency not subject to many of the discrimination laws.
3. Agressive code enforcement against apartment building owners who might let properties decline in anticipation of the neighborhood going African-American and low income, but being willing to negotiate if they put their listings exclusively with the Housing Center.
4. Testing real estate agents for violation of fair housing laws, but agreeing to let them slide if they agreed to list exclusively with the Housing Center.
5. Creating an investment vehicle to purchase blighted apartment buildings, listing exclusively through the Housing Center.
5. Making the housing center staff specifically steer based on race, but in the opposite of the normal direction. They would only show all-white buildings to black customers, and show white customers to majority black buildings. The Housing Center did similar steering for single family houses. The specific goal was "a black a block" so that most residents would have an African American neighbor, but that clusters would not form that could cause momentum for houses to sell.
6. School districts drawn to evenly spread out African Americans among all of the schools.
7. Direct community outreach with police visits and conversations with people on the block that might object to an African American resident on their block.
8. Making For Sale signs on lawns illegal.
All in all, an absolutely amazing and masterful piece of social engineering, that has not to my knowledge been replicated anywhere else. That said, this is all fairly heavy handed, and IMO goes right up to, and perhaps past the line of legality.