How Today's Developers Maintain Jim Crow Housing Segregation

[thelakelander]

A private Brooklyn developer and a Louisiana public housing authority share the belief that racial division in housing has its plusses.

BRENTIN MOCK

What's the value of black lives when it comes to housing discrimination? A Brooklyn property developer answered that question recently when writer D. W. Gibson spoke with him for New York magazine about his real-estate management practices: 

"The average price for a black person here in Bed-Stuy is $30,000 dollars. Up over there in East New York, it's $10,000 dollars."

This is how much it would cost to pay off African-American residents to leave a building that he (given the alias Ephraim in the piece so he could speak candidly) wanted to develop. The buyout, Ephraim explains, is so he can replace them with white tenants. The reason for this is that white tenant prospects had gotten "riled up" at the thought of having to live next to black people, he told Gibson.

It's the kind of flagrant discrimination you might expect to hear so brazenly admitted only in the Deep South. Those racially coded—OK, blatant—cost-benefit analyses certainly still exist there, as well. In February, New Orleans developer Pres Kabacoff expressed similar sentiments in an interview with Gawker, about what market-rate tenants often expect of their property conditions before moving there. Equating black residents with crime, Kabacoff said:

If there's crime that follows, the market rate gets nervous, votes with their feet and leaves, then it doesn't work. So what do you do with [very low-income tenants] that's too difficult? You just don't take them, or you evict them. Just get them out of there. I don't have the staff to deal with them. One of the deficiencies of the Hope VI model is how do you provide social services for those people?

... In terms of race, black people in [New Orleans] have less money. When neighborhoods revitalize, I think it chases all the poor out, and in our city the poor are almost all black, so it's more a coincidence. And there is probably some racism involved in that. That's the downside of neighborhood improvement.

Full article: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/05/how-todays-developers-maintain-jim-crow-housing-segregation/393188/

[Gunnar]

It's the kind of flagrant discrimination you might expect to hear so brazenly admitted only in the Deep South.

I think "admitted" is the key word here. Is / was the North really that much less racist than the South? Sundown towns come to mind.