The same pattern of charging excluded buyers more for worse terms reappears decades later as subprime lending. Steering buyers away from some neighborhoods still continues. The city once soaked by installment-contract selling led the country in residents holding subprime loans.
When banks and government insurers refuse mortgages to a group, sellers can step into the gap with installment deals at prices double to quadruple a home's value. The buyer gets no equity until the end, and a single missed payment lets the seller evict them, keep everything paid, and resell the house to the next family.
Buyers who know one late payment means losing everything will do whatever it takes to pay. They work double shifts, skip repairs, cram in tenants and charge them high rents. The scheme pushes its own victims to squeeze others and run down their homes, and the decay is then blamed on them.
Neighborhoods that turn into slums are often not explained by the residents' culture or by white flight. They are the product of a legal and financial system that overcharges people trapped in a separate housing market. Inflated prices and harsh terms drain whole communities while the sellers grow rich, and the blight, poverty and unrest follow.
Speculators profited at both ends of a neighborhood's change. They went door to door telling white owners that Black families were coming, so the owners sold cheap. Then they resold the same houses at steep markups to Black buyers who had nowhere else to go. Mob violence against newcomers kept the separate markets in place and the panic believable.