practice developed to evaluate the risks associated with loans made to specific urban neighborhoods (Massey & Denton 51), also prevented minority families from purchasing homes. Redlining by mortgage lenders and insurance companies has meant either refusals to provide loans and mortgage insurance or their availability at higher rates or for shorter periods of time (Goering 31).Other barriers of establishing racially integrated neighborhoods included the practices by real estate agents of blockbusting and racial steering. Blockbusting is the method that realtors used to open up neighborhoods to black entry and to reap profits during the transition (Massey & Denton 37). In the process, blockbusting agents would select a promising area for racial turnover, most often an area adjacent to the ghetto that contained older housing, poorer families, aging households, and some apartment buildings. Agents would then quietly acquire a few homes or apartments in the area, and rent or sell them to carefully chosen black families (Massey & Denton 37-38). Steering means directing white households to all-white neighborhoods and referring black households either to all-black or to integrated neighborhoods (Goering 32).Real estate agents accelerate the pace of racial change byinfluencing the white households in integrated neighborhoodsto sell their houses, often at a loss, but certainly at less than the loss they have been led to anticipate with the influx of more black neighbors. Real estate agents or developers buy these artificially devalued properties for resale at a markup to blackhouseholds (Goering 32).Whether or not residential segregation continues to exist is a highly debatable subject. Many claim that segregation ahs decreased in American cities, whereas others point to residential patterns in large metropolises to maintain that African-Americans and whites are still segregated. Even the optimistic authors who note decreased levels of ...
