The NY Times story is amazingly neutral. The only negative thing they mention is Fred Trump would not rent apartments to blacks, but that is already pretty widely known. Donald Trump is not going to get many black votes, so it is pointless to have an outreach.
Fred Trump wanted nothing to do with the rich people in Manhattan. That probably created some spirited conversations over Thanksgiving dinner.
I don’t blame Fred at all. My brother was partner in a nice apartment complex called “Primavera” in Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. Most of the tenants were Jewish and took very good care of their apartments, paid on time, even ahead of time, watered trees, and kept hallways spotless. In the 70s blacks began migrating from Bedford-Stuyvesant into this area and because of new laws my brother and his partner were forced to rent to blacks. They kept everything filthy, even urinating on the stairs and the elevators, and not paying as agreed. My brother had to hire a permanent attorney in charge of evictions, which were taking place at the rate of 5-10 per month. The older people had to move out and more blacks came into the complex. Ten years later, the place was in shambles, crime rate was beyond incredible, and drug use was impossible. My brother couldn’t sell the place, couldn’t even give it away. In 1982 the whole complex was razed down to the ground and the lot sold for peanuts.
I had a similar experience in San Antonio where after retiring from the Army I owned a buy-here-pay-here car lot. At one point I had to stop financing to blacks. My repo rate for blacks was running about 80%, and when I got the vehicle back it was trashed. My repo rate on Mexicans was in the 30s and for whites in the low teens.
It’s quite a sad situation but most people don’t have the integrity to stand by their word and even a written contract is absolutely meaningless.
One way the housing market adapted to the federal rules was condos. By converting from apartments to condos, the decision to move into a complex now involves the mortgage process rather than the discretion of the property manager. You can still wind up with unit owners renting out their units, but that is an individual without deep pockets making those potentially illegal decisions.
My condo building has 8 units – it is in the part of “white” Charlotte that was developed in the 1980s. There is me, my 74 year old neighbor Sam from Mississippi, Fred #2 the sort of Jewish guy in his 40s living off his allowance from his parents’ estate, and a disabled woman I’ve never met
Upstairs we have a rental with a couple – she works as a nurse and he has an accounting job. Another unit is a single white woman about my age who goes to work every day. The unit over Fred is a black woman who Fred thinks is a prostitute, because of the number of different men than come and go. The last few unit (I think) is an immigrant from Iran who has lived here a long time.
Somewhere in the complex we have a black man who has not paid his monthly assessment in several years. The property manager’s main course of action is to get a judgement and possibly initiate foreclosure. If the unit is “upside down”, that’s a pretty hollow threat and the threat of invoking the shield of racial protection can’t be ignored. About the best they can hope for is when he sells the unit, there is some equity to pay back the unpaid assessments.
Facts and statistics are such annoying things
It is the result of lobbyists that when you have hundreds or even thousands of dollars stolen from you by tenants who did not pay what they owe, you have to hire an attorney, but if a record company alleges that you copied a CD or downloaded songs, an employee of the federal government will knock on your door and do their bidding at taxpayer expense.