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Working Paper
Blockbusting and the Challenges Faced by Black Families in Building Wealth Through Housing in the Postwar United States
We study the impacts of blockbusting, i.e. large-scale racial turnover of urban neighborhoods orchestrated by real estate professionals using aggressive and discriminatory practices. In a panel of census tracts across large cities in the postwar United States, we compare tracts subjected to blockbusting activity to similar neighboring tracts not subjected to blockbusting. We find that blockbusting caused substantially lower house values over the next few decades. To understand the mechanisms behind this effect, we analyze property-level data in one neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. We find ...
Working Paper
The Racial Dynamics of U.S. Neighborhoods and Their Housing Prices from 1950 Through 1990
We characterize the dynamics of neighborhood racial composition by using the k-medians machine learning technique to group neighborhoods into five different patterns according to the evolution of the Black population share of census tracts from 1950 through 1990. The procedure classifies tracts into groups that: always have a high Black population share, always have a low Black population share, have a steep increase in the Black population share from 1950-1960, or 1960-1970, and those that have a gradual increase in the Black population share from 1950-1990. We calculate the growth in median ...