Blacks & Property Values

I remember one Saturday morning at an Orthodox shul in 90035, the speaker during the announcements noted the new soul food restaurant on Pico Blvd, and said that if its owner knew something that we didn’t, we should all sell our homes quickly.

Steve Sailer writes:

From the Washington Post:

‘This can’t happen by accident.’

For generations, African Americans have faced unique barriers to owning a home — and enjoying the wealth it brings. In Atlanta, where predominantly black neighborhoods are still waiting for the recovery, the link between race and real estate fortune is stark.

By Emily Badger Wonkblog May 2, 2016

SOUTH DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — When the new subdivisions were rising everywhere here in the 1990s and early 2000s, with hundreds and hundreds of fine homes on one-acre lots carved out of the Georgia forest, the price divide between this part of De­Kalb County and the northern part wasn’t so vast.

Now, a house that looks otherwise identical in South DeKalb, on the edge of Atlanta, might sell for half what it would in North DeKalb. The difference has widened over the years of the housing boom, bust and recovery, and Wayne Early can’t explain it.

The people here make good money, he says. They have good jobs. Their homes are built of the same sturdy brick. Early, an economic development consultant and real estate agent, can identify only one obvious difference that makes property here worth so much less.

“This can’t happen by accident,” he says. “It’s too tightly correlated with race for it to be based on something else.”

The communities in South DeKalb are almost entirely African American, and they reflect a housing disparity that emerges across the Atlanta metropolitan area and the nation. According to a new Washington Post analysis, the higher a Zip code’s share of black residents in the Atlanta region, the worse its housing values have fared over the past turbulent housing cycle.

It’s sad, but true: blacks tend to be bad for property values. One reason even in well-kept up, low crime middle class black neighborhoods is because people aren’t just buying a house, they are buying schoolmates for their children. There’s also a bigger danger that a middle class black neighborhood will slip into an underclass neighborhood than in a comparable white neighborhood, since middle class blacks are more likely to have nephews and so forth come live with them, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air style. A foreclosure issue is that blacks have fewer affluent relatives to borrow from to help them get over life’s bumps.

Part of the bursting of the Housing Bubble in 2007-2008 was the unexpected rediscovery that old stereotypes about black and Hispanic neighborhoods being poor investments tend to be true.

COMMENTS:

* Large numbers of whites move to a geographic region, there is an explosion of innovation, new businesses, development. The whole area gentrifies, properties shoot up, etc.

Large numbers of blacks move to an area, government dependency shoots up, low income housing shoots up, the schools go down the tubes, crime jumps, property values drop.

If you control for the individual family, same type of job, same type of income, the family that chooses to move around the gentrifying upwardly mobile types which tend to be more ethnically white will see housing value appreciate, and the family that moves to the ethnically black neighborhood will see housing value drop.

* Just explain to me why when whites move into the neighborhood, it’s bad for black people and when whites refuse to move into the neighborhood it’s also bad for black people. Good luck.

* It’s called free association.

In the old authentic America you had the right to live with people of your choosing.

In the new fraudulent pseudo-America you are forced to live with aliens and hostiles.

The core outrage of all of this is:

Who invented the towns? The neighborhoods? Who invented the water supplies? The power supplies? The entire infrastructure that supplanted the raw wilderness that was there previously?

Whites created it all but now have no claim to it as whites. Which results in —-of course—- white dispossession.

Legalized racial dispossession of the founding stock of any nation on the planet is very rare. It usually only occurs as a result of total defeat on the battlefield.

The amount of white sweat equity that was transferred to aliens in towns across just California in the past thirty years must be a trillion dollars at least. Whole towns invented and hacked out of the wilderness by whites have been transferred to new occupants. This occurred through ethnic cleansing and it wasn’t nonviolent.

* Steve do low crime Black neighborhoods even exist in Los Angeles? From what I have read, even Baldwin Hills has a high crime problem because they are located way too geographically close to The Jungle, which has housing projects like you see in Training Day.

* The same disparity is seen in Montgomery (white) vs. Prince George’s (black) counties of Maryland, both DC suburbs catering to at least middle class DC government employees. Blacks have done well in government employment and these in Prince George’s are the cream of that crop. But still their schools are doing poorly esp. on test results.

* “…middle class blacks are more likely to have nephews and so forth come live with them…”

Uh-huh. Also those same homeowners are likely to have their own children “come to live with them.” And the more successful and affluent those middle-class black parents are, the more salient reversion toward the mean among their offspring will be.

Any potential white buyers can look fifteen years into the future of a new middle-class black suburb and correctly predict the likely swell of boorishness and crime as the aging middle-class black suburbanites lose control of their maturing spawn, flush with the strength of youth and morally liberated by BLM/BAMN/flavor-of-the-week agitators.

* Blacks aren’t necessarily getting a “better deal” finding cheaper homes in black neighborhoods. Yes, life in black neighborhoods will be easier for them that it would be for whites, but those neighborhoods are still much higher in crime, and black criminals are more than happy to target blacks. Blacks who can afford to often try to live in white neighborhoods.

* Tired of the white/black racial duopoly in these msm articles. It’s fraud. All of the other racial groups are magically disappeared from the calculus.

These rotten media outlets will continue the dishonest white/black duopoly until they are forced to include Asians Hispanics etc.

Let’s discuss the Asian/black achievement gap, shall we?

And why aren’t Asians mixing with blacks in all corners of society? Where are the 50-50 Asian-black neighborhoods? Churches? Schools? Businesses?

Dark conclusions come to mind when one notices Asian reluctance to embrace black America.

* Regardless of ethnicity, low property values are good for buyers and bad for owners and sellers. The article is focused on the fact that black home owners aren’t getting the home appreciation benefits that whites are. And this is true.

From a mindset of individual meritocracy, this really isn’t fair. Black individuals are financially punished for choosing to self-segregate with their own ethnic group. White individuals are rewarded for self-segregating. And this isn’t due to individual merit, it’s due to group merit.

From another viewpoint, groups of whites are building better neighborhoods and communities than groups of blacks. It’s not white people’s fault that groups of blacks aren’t building nicer neighborhoods and cultural capital. Groups of Asians are surely building better neighborhoods than groups of blacks and politically, it’s not feasible to blame Asians. Politically, the left will need to find a way to blame white and justify redistribution and robbing Peter to pay Paul.

* Sure, low cost housing is a benefit to new buyers, but it’s bad for long time owners and sellers. And blacks aren’t getting the home value appreciation benefits that whites are. That is real.

However, this is largely because groups of blacks don’t make great neighborhoods that shoot up in value like other ethnic groups. And the liberals are trying to find ways to pin that blame onto whites and justify big government redistribution. Note that they aren’t considering Mexicans or Asians because those ethnic groups aren’t politically viable marks to seize money from.

* …if blacks were building great neighborhoods, people would want to move there, and they would rise in value, and nothing whites or Asians or Mexicans do would stop that.

The problem is that when large numbers of blacks move to a neighborhood, crime goes up, schools go down, government dependence goes up, business innovation goes down, the service industry weakens, and economic growth slows.

* Blacks are bad for property values, who’d a thunk.

A couple of years ago in Newark, New Jersey, people were literally selling their houses for pennies and dollars to get out of Dodge. Newark used to be the most dangerous city in the country, now Camden takes the top spot if I remember correctly, though I think Chicago and their pace for 700 murders this year will dethrone Camden.

When my family first came to America they settled in Newark. It was a completely different city back then. Full of hard-working white immigrants, that is until the 67 or 69 riots I forget which. After that, all perishable food markets left the city and all people had to travel miles out of the city to get food.

Serves them right.

* No matter how ‘respectable’, ‘cultured’, ‘polite’ ‘well-mannered’, ‘well educated’ and ‘well spoken’ any given Afro-American appears to be, you can bet the farm that he is closely related to a stereotypical ghetto thug.

The statistics bear this out. Such a vast proportion of the male African American has been incarcerated at least one time in their lives that by sheer force of random probability you can be sure that *every* Afro-American is closely related to a violent thug.

* OT, but the discovery of marijuana at the homes of the Rhoden family in Pike County, Ohio is now leading to speculation that they were murdered by drug dealers – perhaps members of a Mexican cartel.

If that happens to be the case and the murderers are illegal aliens, it’s interesting to speculate what the political ramifications might be.

* I grew up in Dekalb, back in the 70′s. It was the place to be. Now it’s a third world shit hole, and every night on the news, there’s another grieving black momma/grandmomma in Stone Mountain whose thug son has shot someone or been shot. Or whose whose toddler child/grandchild in Lithonia has been run over by a fleeing thug or by the pursuing cop. Or whose daughter has been raped by a thug in Avondale. Or whose home on Memorial Drive has been burglarized or invaded by thugs. And it’s always in south Dekalb. Some portion of the county government is always under investigation, facing probation or being sanctioned. And they keep sending Cynthia McKinneys and Hank Johnsons to DC. So yes, the South Dekalb situation is very tightly tied to race.

* They are trying to blame the problems of black neighborhoods on white neighborhoods that have had success. The instant you consider successful Asian neighborhoods and Hispanic neighborhoods, the logic becomes absurd.

There is a whole political apparatus setup to blame whites for the ills of the world and seize their communities and assets for redistribution. But, the instant they try to expand blame whitey to blame whitey and Asians and even some Hispanics, they will lose political viability.

From Nelson Mandela’s autobiography:

“Ngabelungu” is a Xhosa expression that means, “It is the whites [fault]”

* The vast majority of Blacks can not afford to purchase a home in affluent predominantly Asian suburbs in California like Arcadia and Cupertino, so does that make Asians anti-Black racists?

* So Blacks are benefiting from cheaper prices for identical housing. Sounds like a good thing.

* I stayed with friends in one of these new, upper middle class majority-black (I saw multiple white families) developments in Atlanta in 2007: the houses really were well built (much nicer than the McMansions I’ve been in in the North from the same period, maybe because of lower cost structures), the woods next to each house were very pretty, the neighbors were excited to visit each other and hang out.

But the combination of greater family instability and reversion of income to a lower mean is a bad one-two punch; and a layoff and an ugly divorce later my friends were short-selling their house three years later, in 2010. I had heard they could hardly get anything for it, relative to what they paid.

* I wish. But the 14th Amendment has been held in various SCOTUS decisions to trump everything that came before it i.e. it’s a new government, a coup by the winners of the War of Northern Aggression. Then SCOTUS came out with further doctrines like “separate isn’t equal enough” and so they restrict your ability to avoid mixing.

* This is just the free market setting the correct price on black-owned homes. The more the government mucks with that, the bigger the problems that are gonna ensue, like the housing bubble explosion.

* Asians are Schrödinger Whites. They’re considered white when doing so helps the left (see: the alleged “diversity deficiency” in Silicon Valley) and considered non-white when that helps the left (“muh cultural appropiation”).

* Black males have a one in three lifetime incarceration risk.
So, the probability of any random black male *not* ever being incarcerated is roughly 0.66.
Consider all the close relations, brothers, nephews, uncles, father, sons, cousins, in-laws etc that each and every black male must have. As a ballpark figure, allow 10 of those all told.
0.66 to the power of 10, the probability of *no* close criminal male relation must be a vanishingly small number.

* You can use this site (among others) to check out all the demographic stats of whatever zip codes you want: zipwho.com.

* In the 1990s NYC cabbies were being slaughtered–35-45 per year.

The cabbies were overwhelmingly NAMs.

The cabbies stopped taking fares from lower Manhattan to the ghetto at night.

Danny Glover complained to the NYC taxi commission about this NAM on NAM discrimination. Giuliani cracked down on cabbies. The slaughter continued.

* That’s why we need to send the Homosexual Gentrifier Shock Troops into the ghetto to drive up house values and create wealth for black homeowners! Just think how wonderful it will be for ghetto dwellers when their house prices double or triple! Think of all the Black Wealth that will be created!

Joking aside, this article points out the silliness of SJW thinking.

If ghetto homes INCREASE in value, SJWs bitch about the “institutional racism” of “unaffordable housing” or “gentrification” and insist that white folks pay for “affordable housing”.

If ghetto homes DECREASE in value, SJWs bitch about the “institutional racism” that depresses the price of ghetto homes and prevents black folks from “accumulating wealth” in their homes.

Mess with their heads. When you read an article like this, circle back on them:

“Wait! So what you are saying is that Atlanta has plenty of ‘affordable housing’ for blacks, but very little ‘affordable housing’ for whites? We need to eliminate this ‘institutional racism’ against whites! Whites need to have a ‘white homebuyers subsidy’ until this housing price disparity is eliminated!”

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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