Re: Steve Sailer’s blog item Who Were the Racist Tenants Who Insisted Fred Trump Not Rent to Blacks in Coney Island and Brighton Beach?

From: Virginia Paleoconservative [Email him]

Donald Trump is currently being called every pejorative name possible associated with racism and intolerance.  To facilitate this smear campaign every aspect of his public and private life is being scrutinized for potential flaws to destroy him politically. [ ‘No Vacancies’ for Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias, By Jonathan Mahler and Steve Eder, NYT, August 27, 2016] Steve Sailer has documented this in his recent “Racist Tenants” article.

However, the virulent critics of Trump from the NYC area should recall an embarrassing chapter of New York housing history that has been largely eliminated from memory.  In the 1970’s there was a proposed low income / minority public housing project in Forest Hills, Queens NY.  It was a liberal, highly Jewish, middle class plus area that was relatively crime free and had good schools.  These liberal residents of Forest Hills launched significant protests against the projects, they were delayed, but finally built, and were populated with mostly elderly Jewish people…how curious!

“As the projects filled with minorities, (Mayor) Lindsay, anxious to break what he called “this vicious cycle of racial inequality,” backed a program to decentralize the projects by locating them throughout the city. After fierce resistance in the then mostly Italian-American Corona, it was supposed that the reliably liberal Jewish population of Forest Hills would open its arms to the construction of three 24-story project buildings at the corner of 108th Street and 62nd Road. This spectacular miscalculation was met with weeks of demonstrations featuring picket signs saying NO WELFARE TOWERS IN FOREST HILLS and IMPEACH ADOLF LINDSAY.”… Words like anti-Semite and racist were tossed around.”[The Land That Time and Money Forgot  ,by Mark Jacobson NYMag,  Sept. 9, 2012

Wikipedia’s article on the Forest Hills Co-Op housing says this

“Construction commenced in 1971 amid violent protests. In 1976, the buildings were completed. Until the early 1990s, the projects' population was largely white, elderly and Jewish. Following a 1992 investigation alleging discrimination, the white percentage of the residents has decreased, in favor of more minorities.”

See also

• 100 Protest Low‐Income Housing for Forest Hills, NYT, February 4, 1971
• NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: FOREST HILLS; At the Forest Hills Co-op, a Reminder of Past Fury, By David M. Herszenhorn, NYT, October 22, 1995

My point is that many of the people from NYC (or their children or relatives) who are now calling Donald Trump a racist or worse have conveniently forgot their own relatively recent history of intolerance trying to “wall off” their own safe, ethnic neighborhoods…from that city’s low income minority groups.  People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

See previous letters from the same reader.