Posted June 30 2008
Real Estate, Real Problem
I grew up in a pretty insular community. I went to a Jewish school, had carpools to take me to and from wherever I was going, and almost never used public transportation until I was in college. It’s not that I didn’t like non-Jews or had anything against them - they seemed alright when I passed them on the street. It’s just that I never had much to do with them.
When houses went on the market in my neighborhoods (first Beverlywood, in Los Angeles, sometimes called the Pico-Robertson Area, though that’s a much more expansive designation; later Teaneck, NJ and the accompanying Northern New Jersey towns like Englewood, Fair Lawn, and Bergenfield), sometimes Jews would move in and sometimes not. Especially in Teaneck, as the prices went up and up, the Jewish homes began to outnumber the non-Jewish ones, at least in the areas where synagogues caused Jews to view housing as optimal. There didn’t seem to be any conspiracy; we needed to live within walking distance of a shul. And while that distance could be extended beyond a block or two, your universe of housing options could often be drawn with a simple circle extending between half a mile and a mile around the shul building itself. But matters of convenience were also social, cultural, and economic. A wealthy shul would create wealthy homes around it, and make it harder for those outside the economic class of the shul members to move there.
And then we have the bizarre example posted at the top of this article. Apparently, a realtor or mortgage broker (there seems to be some debate) seems to want the neighbors of the area to band together, influencing the type of people who move in to an auctioned house.
Putting aside the ridiculousness of some of the issues involved here (such as the extreme cost of the house and banks’ willingness to sell an auctioned house to just about anyone to get it off their own hands, regardless of the community’s feelings), is this kind of thing moral? (I leave out the legal issue as well - I have no idea and do not wish to learn enough about real estate to find out.)
This seems akin to having someone use nepotism or personal contacts to fill a job position - something we are all personally outraged by, unless it benefits us personally. The tone of the postcard, however, seems to have a KKK-esque edge of hysteria to it - we can’t allow those people to invade our neighborhood, what with their loud music, their garish clothes, and ridiculously painted cars. I refer, of course, to Sefardim.
Seriously, there would be nothing wrong with recommending a person to a house because you think they would like the neighborhood, or because you would like them to live near you. We spend our whole lives building the community, whether geographic or social, in which we would like to live. Many companies also give financial incentives to employees who recommend new hires. But when it comes to the alarmist, fear-mongering, we-have-to-do-something-or-the-wrong-people-will-move-in kind of attitude, things get creepy. And while I would never resort to Moshe Grussgott’s infamous “reductio ad Hitlerum” rule of Internet debate, it does make me nervous when extreme racial or religious bias enters the public discourse as a basic ingredient of the conversation. It’s one thing to say that we should want a Jew to move in; it’s quite another to say that a Jew should move in so that a non-Jew does not.
What do you think?
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I think you should move in to that house to keep the hate mongers out.