Steering and Real Estate Marketing: Selling Segregation
- “Steering” is the practice of real estate agents guiding home buyers toward or away from certain neighborhoods based on the buyers’ race. It was an official practice in the real estate industry and common in Durham.
- Advertisements for homes in new whites-only suburbs played to white families’ fears that inner-city neighborhoods were unsafe and unsanitary. Developers sold a sunny suburban dream that excluded difference and poverty.
“A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood… members of any race or nationality…whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood”
– Article 34, National Association of Real Estate Boards, Code of Ethics, 1924
Courtesy Durham Herald Co. Newspaper, North Carolina Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Rental ads specified the desired race of tenants, as you see in this excerpt from the 1959 Durham Morning Herald classifieds section. These were weekly rents, $6.00/week in 1959 would be roughly $220/month today.
Notice how this ad for Hope Valley paints suburbia as more healthful, more beautiful, more reputable, and even more free than other parts of the city.
Courtesy Durham County Libraries
- “Steering” is the practice of real estate agents guiding home buyers toward or away from certain neighborhoods based on the buyers’ race. It was an official practice in the real estate industry and common in Durham.
- Advertisements for homes in new whites-only suburbs played to white families’ fears that inner-city neighborhoods were unsafe and unsanitary. Developers sold a sunny suburban dream that excluded difference and poverty.
“A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood… members of any race or nationality…whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood”
– Article 34, National Association of Real Estate Boards, Code of Ethics, 1924
Rental ads specified the desired race of tenants, as you see in this excerpt from the 1959 Durham Morning Herald classifieds section. These were weekly rents, $6.00/week in 1959 would be roughly $220/month today.
Courtesy Durham Herald Co. Newspaper, North Carolina Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Notice how this ad for Hope Valley paints suburbia as more healthful, more beautiful, more reputable, and even more free than other parts of the city.