ead to St. Louis Park. The Star Tribune documented what happened next; a common story for many area homes.
Finlayson listed the house for $14,500, but nobody would buy it. After three years, Finlayson gave up trying to sell the house himself, and he sold it to Hark Realty instead for $8,400.
Hark paid off a remaining mortgage, took out another loan on the house, and sold it to the family of Charity Daniel, a Black woman, for $14,900 on what Harvey Katzovitz called a “contract for deed.”
This contract was, essentially, an extreme form of rent. The Daniels’ paid a fee every month, plus insurance and other costs, to Hark, with the promise that once the contract was paid in full, the house would be theirs.
Daniel’s daughter, helping to pay for the house, told the Star Tribune how the contract payments left little money for much else. “Paint? We haven’t gotten around to that yet,” she said. “The place needs lots of fixing up, but these payments are knocking us all for a loop.”
At face value, contract selling was a unique way to get around redlining loan restrictions and offer houses to Black families. But as one of the only opportunities for Black homeownership, real estate agents across the country took full advantage of the ability to gouge prices and impose any payment terms they liked. Rarely did contract selling actually result in owning a house; instead, it led to poverty.
As an example of the damage caused by this predatory practice, contract selling exploited Chicago Black families out of $3 to $4 billion in wealth in the 1950s and 60s, according to a 2019 report.
And when renting, price gouging still remained a reality for Black families.
In Chicago, as in Minneapolis and other northern American cities, many realtors who used contract selling for gain were Jewish, a natural result of Black people being pushed into Jewish city neighborhoods by covenants and redlining.
And in pursuit of profit, these realtors pushed the cycle of selling to happen faster and to more houses. In doing so, they drove rapid neighborhood change and poverty.
Full Circle: Blockbusting
At first, Jews left metropolitan neighborhoods for the pull of the American Dream in the suburbs. Houses were new, the area was spacious, schools were considered higher quality.
But as realtors and redlining had their way with Black Americans, formerly Jewish neighborhoods like Near North deteriorated; a change that became associated with the Black community, rather than the policies that caused it.
For Jews in Near North, the move to the suburbs became more explicitly a move away from the city by the 1960s. There were stories of Jewish kids being beaten up by gangs in schools and on the streets. Property became visibly run-down. With poverty came concern about crime.
As more Black people moved into Near North, it was also assumed that property values for Jewish and white residents would drop and wipe out housing wealth — a self-fulfilling prophecy thanks to redlining policies.
Fear was in the air. And realtors knew that, with a touch of strategy, fear could drive many people to sell their homes for cheap all at once, kickstarting the cycle of contracts for deed.
The strategies used to spark sales fall, collectively, under the banner of blockbusting. Blockbusting ranged from hiring Black people to walk through a white neighborhood with a baby stroller, to well-placed ads, to staging break-ins to scare homeowners.
The practice is hard to trace (few realtors admit to it) but the result is clear: Mass sell-offs, dubbed panic selling, like the one that hit the Homewood neighborhood in Near North at the time of the Grant urban renewal project in 1964.
“Jews were not trying to be malicious by selling to blockbusters; they truly believed they were doing what was best for them and their families,” says Star-Lack, the Carleton historian. Because of redlining, “they had to move to the suburbs or face financial ruin.”
Blockbusting became easier in Near North, particularly once the frustrations of some disenfranchised Black North-Siders came to a boil. First in 1966, when a 