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We’d like to ignore New York Magazine’s article, “I Put in White Tenants’: The Grim, Racist (and Likely Illegal) Methods of One Brooklyn Landlord,” but people keep emailing us about it, posting it on Facebook — and it’s now “most read” on the magazine’s site.

The article is a Studs Terkel-like stream-of-consciousness 1,600-word quote from a racist Hasidic landlord who describes a variety of questionable and sometimes outright illegal money-making real estate schemes, from buying deeds on lis pendens property to driving blacks out of rental property and replacing them with whites. A sample quote:

The building was full of tenants — $1,300, $1,400 tenants. We paid every tenant the average of twelve, thirteen thousand dollars to leave. I actually went to meet them — lawyers are not going to help you. And we got them out of the building and now we have tenants paying $2,700, $2,800, and they’re all white. So this is what we do. My saying is — again, I’m not racist — every black person has a price. The average price for a black person here in Bed Stuy is $30,000 dollars. Up over there in East New York, it’s $10,000 dollars. Everyone wants them to leave, not because we don’t like them, it’s just they’re messing up — they bring everything down. Not all of them.

Is quoting a racist with no context also racist? Seems the article is implying this guy is not atypical. The article says “It is important to remember that Ephraim [a pseudonym] is one voice on a wide spectrum.”

The article is an excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Edge Becomes the Center,” by DW Gibson, from Overlook Press. Perhaps New York Magazine intends to publish more excerpts in its print magazine that will give a more balanced picture.

In any case, we think it’s worth noting that, racism aside, replacing tenants paying $1,300 or $1,400 for an apartment with tenants paying $2,700 or $2,800 a month is a very common practice in many parts of Brooklyn these days, regardless of the color of the tenants or the views of the landlord.

“I Put in White Tenants”: The Grim, Racist (and Likely Illegal) Methods of One Brooklyn Landlord [NY Mag]


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. I had no idea so many Hasid read brownstoner.

    That is my main takeaway here. It’s not a judgement against anyone–I think it’s good when disparate groups get together and discuss things.

    The part of the article that I found the most disturbing and surprising is the thing about the deeds to foreclosed houses being sold though. Is this widespread? It is really horrifying.

    Also, in general, “hollowing out” a neighborhood by replacing all of its working families with transient nyu students never ends well.

  2. Copied From another Blog>>
    One thing that’s gone unmentioned in all this is that “gentrification” is merely the reverse process of what landlords did decades earlier. Starting in the 50s and continuing for three decades, countless safe white neighborhoods in New York and across America were ruined by landlords deliberately bringing in black tenants in order to drive out whites and have them sell at a loss (look up “blockbusting” if you’re too young and naive to know about this).

    Of course, the feverish “anti-racists” out there will rant that blacks don’t ruin neighborhoods, “socio-economic conditions” do. Well yeah… socio-economic conditions always associated with… what, exactly? Oh yeah, “racism.” It’s wonderfully circular thinking. Only the reality on the ground is that when blacks start moving in, you get crime, you get a massive decline in the effectiveness of schools, you get litter and shabby properties, you get aggressive street behavior, you get sexual assault and rape. How many times does your kid need to get beat up at school before you decide to move out?

    Gentrification? It’s whites taking back the urban centers they built in the first place. And meanwhile, blacks get shoved into suburbs via Section 8 housing, so now those are getting ruined (crime in NYC didn’t so much disappear as it moved elsewhere). Eventually, the cycle will repeat.

    Actually, it probably won’t. Immigration is the new wonder drug for ruining America (deliberately), and it’s pretty much all downhill from here.

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