The Racialized Panic Over Real Estate
A reprint from the San Francisco Chronicle warns Seattle property owners against renting to the Chinese, using inflammatory rhetoric about declining property values.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There is a lesson and moral for our property holders in the following remarks of the San Francisco Chronicle relative to the effect of selling or leasing valuable business property to the Chinese element. That journal says: 'They are slowly but surely absorbing Sacramento street; they have gained a sure foothold on Clay street, as far up as Powell. Wherever they gain a lodging other tenants leave and in a short time property depreciates one-half.' Property-owners ought to exercise a little common sense in this matter and not allow a high rental to tempt them to admit Chinese into their premises. It has been the same old story—big rents for six months or a year, until they have driven other tenants out, and then a return to rates far below the original prices received.
“Wherever they gain a lodging other tenants leave and in a short time property depreciates one-half.”
This reflects the toxic anti-Chinese sentiment of the 1880s that would culminate in the Seattle expulsion riots of 1886. It is a stark reminder of how economic anxiety was used to justify systemic exclusion and racial displacement in the Pacific Northwest.
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