Fear Thy Neighbor: Blockbusting and White Flight in 1960's Chicago

“If anybody who is well established in this business isn’t making a hundred thousand dollars a year, he is loafing,” journalist Alfred Balk wrote in the “Saturday Evening Post” in July of 1962. Balk, quoting one of over 100 Chicago real-estate speculators to whom he had assigned the pseudonym, “Norris Vitchek,” was describing a practice that would eventually help transform the South and West sides of Chicago in the 1960’s from a group of white, middle-class and working-class neighborhoods in 1959 to one large predominantly African-American ghetto in 1970. It was a transformation of these neighborhoods from comfort to poverty, prosperity to blight, and from peaceful, separate coexistence to open racial warfare.