A white real estate dealer bought a house in Grand Boulevard between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth streets about five years ago. When Negro residents came some of the white people sold at a sacrifice. But he remained and four years later sold the property for $2,000 above its cost to him.
An interesting instance related to property on Langley Avenue into which a Negro family moved in 1919. The value of contiguous property remained the same as of property two and three blocks east where no Negroes lived. Six months later, across the street from this Negro family, a white man, aware of their occupancy, bought a house and paid $1,500 more than it had formerly been offered for.
Thus, notwithstanding the prejudice against Negro neighbors that usually obtains, a block or neighborhood into which Negroes move is not always and necessarily depreciated, so many and active are the other factors contributing to depreciation (or sometimes preventing); and so frequently has it occurred that these factors of depreciation have operated extensively prior to the arrival of Negroes.
The fluctuation of values in response to sentiment, both inherent and stimulated, manifested itself in a practice of certain real estate dealers on the South Side. Although it was stated and believed that values were irrevocably destroyed when a Negro family occupied a building, these agents boosted values by announcing that another building had been "saved" or "redeemed," thoroughly renovated, and restored to its "rightful occupants." The Kenwood and Hyde Park Property Owners' Association stated that this plan had succeeded in sixty-eight instances of buildings "reclaimed" by the Association.
A Prairie Avenue block.—To study the processes and factors of depreciation the Commission selected an obviously depreciated block on the once fashionable Prairie Avenue, between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth streets, into which no Negroes had yet moved.
In 1885-90 Prairie Avenue was one of Chicago's most fashionable and exclusive residential streets. Imposing brown- and gray-stone residences, with balconies of stone and ornamental iron, broad bay-windows, and large well-kept lawns behind high iron fences, gave evidence of the wealth and social position of their owners.
The gradual decline of Prairie Avenue, as North Side and North Shore neighborhoods became more fashionable places of residence, and long before the approach of Negroes was even thought of, was exemplified in this block. Chicago Blue Book, a broadly inclusive social directory, published annually, shows that in 1890 the families living at forty-nine of the sixty-one addresses in the block were listed; in 1900 there were eighteen of the forty-nine left; in 1910 there were only ten, and in 1915 only two. Second and third occupants of the houses took the places of fifteen of the original forty-nine in 1900, of nine in 1910, and of four in 1915. The Blue Book listings at five-year intervals are shown in the table on the following page.
A CHANGING NEIGHBORHOOD