The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

CHAPTER 6:
White Flight
p. 93, 1 Kimble 2007, 404.
p. 93, 2 Hoyt 1939, iii, 62; Kimble 2007.
p. 94, 1 Laurenti 1960, 12–15, 37, 51–53; Laurenti 1952, 327. Charles
Abrams (1951, 330) identified a 1948 Washington Business Review
article by Rufus S. Lusk as the source of the statement that “the
infiltration of Negro[es]” tends to appreciate property. However,
Abrams’s citation is incorrect, and I have not been able to identify
the source. Because Abrams was a respected and generally credible
midcentury housing expert, I have accepted that his quotation from
the Lusk article is accurate, although his source citation is not.
Another 1948 Washington Business Review article (WBR 1948, 17),
describing the increase in Washington, D.C.’s, population, did
observe that “[w]hen [the Negro] first goes into a neighborhood,
prices may be higher, but eventually values are apt to be depressed.
This is not always true because the high class colored who now
live on T Street west of 14th maintain their homes well.”
Throughout the period that the FHA attempted to exclude
African Americans from white neighborhoods, other voices refuted
the agency’s belief in the inevitability of property value declines
associated with African American ownership or residence. In 1945,
an article in another professional journal with which FHA staff
would have been familiar, the Review of the Society of Residential
Appraisers, stated that because of the shortage of housing available
to African Americans, neighborhood home prices increased from
60 to 100 percent within three years of integration. An article in the
same journal the following year stated, “It is a fact, the axiom that
colored infiltration collapses the market is no longer true.” In 1952,
the FHA’s own former deputy chief appraiser in Los Angeles wrote
in the same journal that “it was [previously] commonly believed by
nearly all that the presence of Negroes or other minorities in a
neighborhood was a serious value-destroying influence. . . . There
are many locations where such generalizations are no longer true.”
The author of the Appraisal Journal article cited in the text, Luigi
Laurenti, was a professor of economics at the University of
California at Berkeley who analyzed 10,000 property transfers in
San Francisco, Oakland, and Philadelphia. About half were in a test