Harnessing Black economic and consumer power as an agent for social change.
Black communities are being used as a source of cheap reserve housing for others including non-Hispanic whites. The bottom line is the other areas are too expensive.[i]
White Flight
For the past 60-70 years since white-flight of the fifties and sixties, the black communities experienced intentional devaluation of our property and neighborhoods, urban decay, and modern Jim Crow segregation. White-flight was the phenomenon where whites across the North and California fled the urban cores after landmark Supreme Court decisions held racial covenants and segregated schools/buses to be unconstitutional. No one took the urban cores from them – They preferred to live far away in the suburbs or on the other side of town rather than to go to school with us or live with us. The cities emptied out. That’s true dislike for being around black people. After white flight, the “urban” areas, then the code for “Black” areas, saw a period of violence and social decline across the country.[ii]
In Los Angeles during the late sixties and seventies, white flight was the reason for the Valley’s explosive buildup along with the suburb cities and later Westside communities like Century City, the Marina, the Southbay and West Los Angeles. During the property boom of the late 1990’s, property on the white side of Los Angeles skyrocketed to the million dollar price tags for the smaller homes one sees today. Black communities did not see their properties rise at the same incredible rate. Inglewood saw a modest bump in home prices. I lived in Inglewood at this time. White Los Angeles (“The West side”) became expensive real estate; Black Los Angeles remained underdeveloped and undervalued. Greed and racism motivated the extreme housing costs and disparity in Los Angeles and the adjacent cities.[iii]
Today the new urbanites are flooding the urban cores and relocating the existing Blacks with a powerful combination of extreme rent and property increases and a brutal police force.[iv]
What is happening is the continued and sustained discriminatory and arbitrary application of the factors that affect desirability and therefore property prices. This discrimination allows for the new urbanites to intentionally pay less for great property under the guise of appraisals. Blacks with homes and property in the black side of Los Angeles and surrounding cities are being offered too low of bids considering the future economic profits and expectations- thus cheating Blacks from fully participating in the economic riches.[v]
Essays on Modern Jim Crow and Black Relocation From the Urban Cores; Inglewood, CA is Great with Blacks 