3: Real estate agents push: ‘Now is the time to sell’
By Cameron McWhirter
June 17, 2001
The Detroit News
A real-estate agent had been talking to Shiovitz. The agents called homeowners all the time in those days.
“The real-estate man called and told me, ‘I can get you a good price....’ He said, ‘Well now is the time to sell. If you wait a few years you’re not going to get the price you want,’ ” Shiovitz recalled.
Shiovitz could get a larger house on Westmoreland, past Evergreen. Other Jews were moving that way. A bigger yard. Three bedrooms. A garage that would fit his car. The house would be affordable with the $3,500 down payment he would raise by selling now.
Shiovitz knew that the family moving into his old house would be black, though he never met them. The real-estate agent handled everything.
Blacks were moving up 12th Street, having crossed over from the lower east side, where the Jews used to live. Whites had better sell before their property values went down, real estate agents were warning. Remember the 1943 riots? Blacks meant trouble, the real-estate people said. Read The News, the Free Press or the Times: Blacks meant crime.
Shiovitz didn’t buy all of that. He had no problem with black people. He had worked with them all his life. During the Depression he grew up alongside them on Alger near Hastings Street. Jews in Detroit always had gotten along with blacks, not like other ethnic groups, such as the Poles, who always seemed to be fighting with blacks. But that did not mean Jews wanted to live next to black people.
[This is so disingenuous as to be obscene. Shiovitz and McWhirter both knew that blacks bring crime; the fears were entirely rational, but they’re playing a little game: Blame it on anyone but the real culprits. McWhirter is using sarcasm, in order to blame the realtors, and Shiovitz is blaming it on the “Goyim.”]
Black children were enrolling at Roosevelt Elementary a few blocks away. His daughter walked home one day from school and announced her new “boyfriend,” a little black kid. B’nai David, with its 1,600-seat temple on the corner of 14th, was looking into buying land in Southfield, a burgeoning suburb where lots of Jews were moving.
Shiovitz’s white Goyim neighbors on either side seemed fearful that blacks would bring crime, and they were looking to sell. Petty crime had been increasing. Smart-aleck kids — he didn’t know whether white or black —would occasionally steal children’s bikes off porches to joyride. That kind of thing didn’t happen before.
“Sometimes (the bicycles) would be missing altogether. Sometimes they would find them down on the corner,” he said. “This was the start of things going down.”
[Bull. He knew it was the black kids, but was (justifiably) afraid of being painted by McWhirter as a “racist.”]
Why not move to a bigger house away from all these problems?
"Genug iz genug," as the Yiddish saying goes: "enough is enough."
[Previously, in this series:
“The White Devils Made Me Do It! Classic Detroit News Series Blames Whites for City’s Destruction”; and
“The Black Conquest of Detroit, Part II: The Jews Played ‘Nice,’ but Got Destroyed, Just Like the ‘Racist’ White Gentiles.”
See also:
“Growing Up White in Detroit.”]
1 comment:
Blacks ALWAYS bring crime with them. This happened to the lily white neighborhood I was raised in. Now it has only a handful of whites left. Almost all of the homes have either bars on the windows, or heavy iron bars across the front door. This is in a neighborhood where no house goes for less than $250,000.
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