The Economic Aftermath of the 1960s Riots in American Cities: Evidence from Property Values

In the 1960s many American cities experienced violent, race-related civil distur-bances. This article examines census data from 1950 to 1980 to measure the ri-ots ’ impact on the value of central-city residential property, and especially on black-owned property. Both OLS and IV estimates indicate that the riots de-pressed the median value of black-owned property between 1960 and 1970, with little or no rebound in the 1970s. Census tract data for a small number of cities suggest relative losses of population and property value in tracts that were di-rectly affected by riots compared to other tracts in the same cities. he course of racial politics in the United States changed abruptly between the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In August 1965 the torching and looting of the Watts area of Los Angeles was the opening salvo in a series of major urban riots.1 The 1960s riots were neither the first nor the last race-related “civil disturbances ” in American cities in the twentieth century, as examples in the 1910s, 1940s, and more recently vividly attest. Still