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Since I literally wrote the book (well, the chapter) on blockbusting, I guess I’ll take this on. Whites were victims of blockbusters, but also victims of their own racist psychology. And they weren’t the only victims in the story. A 
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When I wrote about the blockbusting (=panic peddling) process in Chicago, I used evidence gleaned from the white people who believed it meant they were losing their homes and neighborhood to rapacious real estate dealers who resold (exploitatively) to African Americans. [2/14]
They definitely see saw themselves as victims, because they didn’t recoup from the sale of their homes the value that they expected to from their investment. Typical pressure tactics meant that only the first purchaser received anything close to “fair market” value. [3/14]
“Fair market” value is of course a complicated and misleading term that fails to acknowledge the dual housing market and the fact that black buyers typically paid out MORE for homes they often didn’t end up owning. [4/14]
White homesellers on busted blocks thought they were victims because they lost money and neighborhoods they valued; but they didn’t understand or were willfully ignorant that black buyers were too because contract sales were so exploitative. [5/14]
My favorite quote in BbB was from a black activist: blockbusters were “selling to the white homeowner his own panic and getting paid for it. His sales pitch would fall flat if white homeowners were not already prepared to resent, resist and avoid living near Negro people.” [6/14]
I don’t like to pick on use of the passive voice (that’s another thread) but the original question here does obscure the matter of WHO overstates the prevalence of blockbusting. Are you talking about “blockbusting” in the general culture or in scholarship specifically? [7/14]
In some ways “blockbusting” is kin to “white flight” and “redlining.” People throw it around loosely as if we all know what it means, even though these terms all arose out of specific historical contexts that shaped how contemporary historical actors thought about them. [8/14]
But it’s still a good question pointing at an important idea: by what mechanisms did African Americans gain access to private housing in white neighborhoods? I emphasize private here, since Hirsch’s MSTG’s account is crucial to understanding public housing but not private. [9/14]
There are definitely people who use the term blockbusting to mean the arrival of any black residents in “white” neighborhoods. That does get at the “busting” idea, but not the specific mechanism of real estate dealers who targeted racist and fearful white homeowners. [10/14]
But I’m not sure it should apply on blocks like the one I live on, for example, which was (as far as I know) peacefully integrated and where there are houses that filter back and forth between white and black owners without triggering a sell-off by whites. [11/14]
The term blockbusting also definitely shouldn’t apply to places that were intentionally integrated in ways that were meant to promote racial stability, like Oak Park west of Chicago and the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. [12/14]
So maybe this is all a reason to use the term “panic peddling,” which much more specifically gets at the process of real estate dealers preying on the racism and economic fears of white homeowners without opening up the looser meanings. [13/14]
But the original question stands: how widespread was blockbusting? I fully agree that needs better unpacking. We can’t just assume that because a block was temporarily integrated that panic peddling was the means. I’d love to know what the variations can teach us. [14/14]
