Look here, you know, you're going to want to sell your home.
JOHNSON: So they would approach the white homeowners and basically scare them - the Negroes are coming. And one major mechanism that drove the shift was a predatory real estate practice called blockbusting.ĬHANG: Johnson would come to understand only years later how his family, like so many other Black families at the time, were unknowing targets in a scheme that helped a lot of real estate agents make a lot of money. MEHTA: This American reality played out starkly in Compton, a city that went from being almost exclusively white to majority Black. And when a neighborhood turns Black, property values go down. Oftentimes, when a neighborhood turns white, property values go up. You see, perceptions, including racist perceptions, shape the real estate market. MEHTA: Why do you think white families moved away?ĬHANG: This perception, that the arrival of Black residents was reason to be scared, this is one of the most powerful forces impeding generations of Black Americans from building wealth through homeownership. SANCHEZ: Say, two, three years, everybody was gone. The white people seemed to have left very quickly? But then.ĬHANG: But then she says most of those white families on this block started leaving. SANCHEZ: And then over here was a white family with kids and all (ph).
And she says back when she first moved to Compton, almost everyone on her block was white. JUANITA SANCHEZ: There lived a white person with a son.ĬHANG: Juanita Sanchez (ph) has lived on this block since the late 1950s. His new next-door neighbor noticed the same thing. You know, you're a kid, you know?ĬHANG: Another thing he noticed - everyone moving in that day was Black, just like his own family. JOHNSON: And so I thought it was moving day for everybody - everybody just switch houses (laughter). For blocks and blocks, he sees people moving into houses. Johnson is just 5 years old, and he realizes his family isn't the only one moving into Compton that exact same day. I see moving vans, trucks and everything, all down the street. ROBERT JOHNSON: And I'm looking down the street. JONAKI MEHTA, BYLINE: There's this day that's been imprinted on Robert Johnson's mind for the past 60 years. It's a city just south of downtown LA that was in the midst of transforming from all white to majority Black. We're going to show you the forces responsible for this by visiting Compton in the 1960s.
But the real estate market often values homes in majority-Black neighborhoods much less than comparable homes in white neighborhoods, robbing Black families of wealth and opportunities like financing a college education. For most Americans, the key to building intergenerational wealth is to own a home.
3011 PALMER DR COMPTON CA SERIES
As part of our series on American democracy called We Hold These Truths, we've been looking at property ownership in this country and the structural forces that have held back Black homebuyers.
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