[TChad]

Long ago, in NE Portland, Oregon I lived in the same house as my landlord and his girlfriend. He was a young white guy, not much money. He was trying to make a living by buying one cheap house after another, fixing it up, and selling it. He bought what he considered to be a bargain house in the nearby black community. He worked on it for a couple of months. When he arrived one morning, his house had been burned to the ground. It was definitely arson, and based on conversations he had with people in that community he had little doubt of the motive. He was a white man in a black neighborhood.

I don't know if he ever recovered financially.

What sane white person would want to invest in such a community?

[Cen-Tejas]

40 odd years ago I started my career in the real estate “industry” as a house salesman selling hundreds before burning out and moving on to “developing” real estate.

Anyway, one day I had a newly wed couple and showed them a half dozen or so homes in their price range and on the right side of the tracks. Nothing doing. So, in desperation I told them about a house in a beautiful NEW neighborhood with one home I was sure they would love. They immediately said “let’s go look”. I replied “whoa, I feel compelled to tell you that the talk around town is the subdivision is on the wrong side of town and already headed in the wrong direction demographically”. Being young liberals they said “well, we don’t mind living in a neighborhood with a lot of blacks so let’s go look”.

Long story short, they bought the house over my too strenuous warnings. 5 years later the called and said “can you sell this thing?”

I informed them I was no longer in that business but would suggest a friend. He tried and could not get an offer at any price. By that time there were a couple hundred houses in the subdivision. The young couple just moved out and years later I drove by and the whole subdivision had been bulldozed. The whole area was just open pastureland. Not a word in the local press.

My guess is there are thousands of stories out there similar to mine and this Portland story.