NYMAG article "I Put in White Tenants"

"But my instincts tell me this is more about selling books than in telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. "

Homeowner wrote:
"Whether or not Ephraim actually has tenants saying those things to him directly, I've lived among and done business with the Hassidic community enough to know that his perspective on the impacts of blacks on his real estate are not the exception to the rule."


@homeowner -
I think most people engaged in arbitrage have a distain for people who thwart their plans, and love to take advantage of less-than-savvy buyers and sellers.

WNYC has a good piece today on how real estate professionals look for less than savvy sellers and buyers, by playing on their racial fears and stereotypes: http://www.wnyc.org/story/historian-says-dont-sanitize-how-our-government-created-the-ghettos/

It is all about knowing your customer base, and what they define as "value".

@homeowner, I don't know if when you say "his community" about Ephraim you mean the landlords in general or Hassidic Jews in particular, but it reads to me as the latter in a way I hope you didn't intend. I'm not going to say that the Hassids aren't prejudiced - they distrust anyone who isn't Hassidic - but, as I think you're getting to in some of your other posts, to blame them for racial segregation in our communities is closing your eyes to the wider issues. 

Because of our egalitarian norms and the real wealth and income differences between blacks and whites, it’s easy to conclude that white preference for white neighborhoods is a kind of class discrimination, which we can fix through active, interventionist policy. But in this situation, the answer we might want isn’t the one that’s true. For white homebuyers, race matters, and not just as a proxy for class.

The main vehicles for this finding are a series of experiments from Maria Krysan, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In more than a decade’s worth of studies, Krysan and her collaborators have looked at the relationships among neighborhood desirability, class, and race, drawing from surveys and interviews with whites, blacks, and other groups.

In one experiment Krysan and her researchers developed 13 videos showing five neighborhoods of different social class levels: lower working class, upper working class, blemished middle class, unblemished middle class, and upper middle class. Participants would infer the wealth and income of neighborhoods in the short videos by aesthetic qualities: the size of the lots, the conditions of the homes, and so on. A blemished middle-class neighborhood would have homes with overgrown yards and boarded-up garages, while an unblemished one would have neither.

In addition to class characteristics, Krysan also added people. For four of the five neighborhoods—the fifth was empty, as a control—researchers made three variations. Each one had a different racial composition. In one version of the upper-middle-class video, the residents were white. In another they were black. And in another there was a mix. They would wear the same kinds of clothes and do the same kinds of activities. In private, participants would watch the videos—with random assignments for the racial composition—and then rate them in terms of home costs, property upkeep, safety, future property values, and school quality.

For all participants, white and black, class mattered. The wealthier the neighborhood—as inferred by characteristics—the higher the rank. But for whites race was a major influence. “Whites who saw an all-White neighborhood ranked the neighborhood significantly more positively than Whites who saw the identical neighborhood with all Black residents,” writes Krysan. And in turn mixed neighborhoods had higher ratings than black ones but lower ratings than the all-white alternatives. This was true in every neighborhood across every dimension other than property upkeep. If whites saw blacks in the unblemished middle-class neighborhood, for example, they assumed more crime and worse schools than if it were all-white. (Indeed, a 2001 study from sociologists Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager found that reports of crime and disorder increase with the proportion of black residents in a neighborhood even after you control for the actual levels of crime and disorder.)

An earlier experiment using real-life cities had similar results. Researchers asked respondents in four metropolitan areas—Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles—to rate 23 communities of different incomes, social characteristics, and racial compositions. Again, class matters, but so does race. With more blacks came a lower rating, even when the neighborhood was prosperous.

I am from a Wisconsin suburb. My parents voluntarily put me on a bus to an elementary school in the (black) inner city as part of an integration program. They had black friends in the '70s, and I had playdates with their biracial children growing up. 

This is an interesting set of comments in this thread.  A lot more mature than some of the angry  histrionics one comes across on the other 'clickbait' blogs.  I agree with those who have become suspicious of the devil in the details of this 'outrageous' and 'offensive' interview.

While parts or elements of what's being said in Ephraim's are true, the parts that are true are things that everyone here already knows to be true.  Yes, rent-stabilized and SRO tenants are bought out with sums of 10,000 or 30,000 or whatever dollars. Yes, people like to replace tenants who pay little rent with tenants who pay a lot of rent.  Yes, rents go up by a lot.  Yes, it's mostly a matter of supply and demand in a city with a low vacancy rate.  Yes, it's a market force.  Yes, there is some racism at play.  Yes, an all black building can, even in 2015, affect 'values' in the eyes of investors, who can be ruthless.  Yes, people engage in unethical and illegal behavior.  Yes, there is a racist component.

We all know these things already.

A good exercise for everyone here would be to read the 'conversations on gentrification' taking place on (other) blogs like this. You'll notice racism there, too, but of a different nature.

First we have the talk of the Hassids.  It always comes up.  The conversation can be mild, as in, "I've worked with the Hassids extensively in real estate and I noticed that they can be racist" to "The greedy Jews are driving out the blacks."   See the "Movement to Protect the People" for the latter piece (they post flyers in S. Crown Heights in people's mailboxes saying specifically that).  Regardless, those who decry racism should proceed more critically when they read widely-dispersed interviews from "Ephraims" who say crazy things like "every black has a price".  Question why a journalist would choose an interview like that, and question why it's being reposted so thoroughly.  I'm not saying it shouldn't be - just be aware of what how it might be perceived.

Next, we have talk, on all these blogs, about the evil Midwesterners.  Even with the comments in this thread, it starts to border on viciousness.  It's even worse on some of the (seemingly) anti-gentrification sites like Gothamist.   Every white person is a naive, racist Midwesterner, paying their apartments thanks to trust funds and calling police when people have loud parties (something which is perfectly justifiable under certain circumstances, incidentally), and wishing ill-will of colored people unconsciously, their liberal arts degrees having given them a thick primer of patronizing, unconscious racism.  White privilege, etc. Those people don't work, and yet they come in and use white skin to ethnically cleanse the neighborhood.  It's all ridiculous when put like that, but it's a theme I read again and again in the anti-gentrification 'blogosphere'. 

Those are stereotypes, too.

In a city of 8.5 million people, picking and choose the most outrageous interviews is bound to get you the emotional drive you seek of your readers.    

And the blogs are more than happy for the click that generates. 

Hell, there's a schizo down the street that hands out on the corner near Fulton and rants loudly about all sorts of stuff.  How about we interview him on the topic, I'm sure he'll say something offensive.

So, let me get this straight.  White trash is no more welcome in more affluent black neighborhoods than in more affluent white neighborhoods?  

That just means your relatives were jerks, though.  It doesn't make them representative.