he excuse that they use [is]…’the riots caused us to leave, anti-Semitism caused us to leave,’” said Russell Star-Lack, a graduate of Carleton College who uncovered much of this Minneapolis Black-Jewish urban history, and several of the documents referenced in this story, in his senior thesis.
“Really, it’s the other way around,” he said. “Jews leaving…causes the beginning of the ghettoization process and this economic dislocation that increases these racial tensions and causes the [late-1960s unrest].”
Houses For Sale
There is no way to get around how absurd this sounds, but unwitting Jewish involvement in Black exploitation in real estate began with a simple act: Selling.
For Jews in Near North, there was nothing malicious about it. After World War II, the federal G.I. Bill provided cheap loans for buying a house in the developing suburbs.
Near North was crowded and full of old houses. So young Jewish families usually went to St. Louis Park instead, to raise children in comfortable new ramblers. As a tight-knit community, once the migration began, the older generations followed — and sold their North Side homes.
The move to St. Louis Park was quick. In 1936, almost 70% of Minneapolis-area Jews lived in Near North. By 1963, only about 25% were in Near North.
As Jews moved out of the city, many Black people were moving in, part of the second wave of the Great Migration. They were pushed into Jewish Near North by the segregated housing market. Jewish-owned homes became either rented housing, or the promise of homeownership for Black families.
But homeownership would not be as easy as the cheap housing loans that opened the suburbs to Jews. Because of redlining, Black people were refused loans to buy a house. And unable to buy a house anywhere other than Near North, prices skyrocketed.
As a result, the mundane act of selling a house became an exploitative profit opportunity for real estate agents.
In 1962, Earl Finlayson, a white man, decided to sell his home on Logan Avenue North, on Minneapolis’ North Side, and head 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 neighbor