"block" ~= street, and the OED?

[Wilson Gray]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 3:28 AM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:
> IMO it seems closer to "breaking in[to]" than "destroying".


It was more like 50-50, since the point of that form of block-busting
- busting coloreds into a formerly lily-white block - was to make
money at the business of real estate by instilling into white
residents the fear that the integration of their block was necessarily
going to lead to the disintegration of their money, a self-fulfilling
prophecy.

"White people! The COLORED are coming! The integrity of your
neighborhood (not to mention your neighborhood's *property* values!)
is being *destroyed*! SELL! Get out! Before it's TOO LATE!"

Housing bought for pennies on the dollar from fleeing whites was then
sold to incoming coloreds - ironically, themselves fleeing their
former neighborhoods - for dollars on the penny. And a further
pleasant side-effect for realtors was that property values
concomitantly rose in the 'hoods that the whites were fleeing to,
until, finally, no new neighborhood was left to flee to.

What to do?

Why, build a new neighborhood - and sell the housing therein - of course!

How could that domino-effect not warm the cockles of a realtor's heart?!

Racism isn't always personal.

Sometimes, it's business.


But surely, the use of _block-busting_ in this sense is older than the
'50's in print. Of course,

Youneverknow.

When my family moved from a rented, wooden, not-much-more-than-a-shack
house on Goode Avenue in Chuck Berry's old neighborhood to a
three-bedroom-one-and-a-half-bath, mansion-by-comparison, two-story,
brick house in a "white" neighborhood on Page Boulevard in 1943, this
was certainly referred to as "block-busting." Some neighbors had
at-the-time-legally-binding, written covenants against selling to
colored in order to prevent block-busting.

My WAG is that any resemblance between the two ways of busting a block
is strictly coincidental.
--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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