Blockbusting

Though the use of the word blockbusting is hardly visible in the business and entrepreneur parlance in recent times, the history of the word dates back to the early 1900s in the United States. The word refers to the purposive panic or speculation created by real estate brokers or agents to make white people in the United States sell their property on the pretense that the black community was increasingly migrating into white suburbs, which would reduce the resale value of their property. After World War I, as part of the Great Migration that began in the 1910s, African Americans from the American south migrated in large numbers to the north in search of work and a better standard of living. The reaction of the ...