[Kaylea]

My fiance and I (both white) are interested in buying a home in a neighborhood where the population appears to be entirely black. We are comfortable with black neighbors, or any kind of neighbors, but we don’t know if they would be comfortable with us. After all, there are many many neighborhoods where black people would be made to feel excluded, which is terrible but true in this city. Would we be ‘taking up a spot’ or ‘gentrifying’ a neighborhood if we moved in? From our perspective, we just want a nice place to live without paying way too much, so we can pay off our debts and start a family. The people who live there surely want the same things, but the unfortunate fact is that we could afford to pay more, for a much smaller place in a white neighborhood, and we’d most likely be welcomed by neighbors there — and probably they wouldn’t have that choice. We’re law-abiding and friendly, we’ll pay taxes and buy candybars from the kids football team and keep our part of the street clean — would we be the type of neighbors people want to have? Am I an over-anxious hypocritical white liberal for even asking the question? We definitely prefer a diverse neighborhood to a white neighborhood. I figure that the answer will depend on the neighborhood’s culture, and of course the individuals whether or not a white neighbor would be considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘so what’ or ‘more about class or attitude than race’. Can any generalizations be made fairly, or is the answer extremely variant from person to person? I am not comfortable asking a real estate agent about this because of the history of prejudice I’ve read about, with real estate agents steering their clients into homogenous neighborhoods. Asking random people on the street also seems like a bad approach — so what’s the best way to find out? We don’t know anyone who lives there. ‘Severity’ matter too — a few random comments on the street is not a big deal….that happens everywhere — but everyone around us wishing we didn’t live there would be very unfortunate! Any helpful advice?

User Detail :  

Name : Kaylea, Gender : F, Religion : Atheist, Age : 28, City : Chicago, State : IL, Country : United States, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, Social class : Middle class, 

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