By Steve Sailer
01/25/2021
It is said that insurance claims for damage due to BLM/Antifa riots is in the $1 to $2 billion range.
But the total cost could be much vaster. How much decline in property values did the Black Lives Matter riots and subsequent increase in murders (gun murders were up 31% in 2020 over 2019) and carjackings cause?
This is a difficult empirical question to answer for multiple reasons. First, everything is in motion for multiple reasons. Interest rates, for example, were cut very low in 2020, which drives up home prices.
Also, the pandemic hurt urban real estate, because with a virus around, public transportation is less of an amenity and a house in the suburbs is preferable to an elevator apartment building downtown.
And there’s the conceptual question: if a self-destructive policy hurts urbanites, does it also help suburbanites?
Residential property in the US is worth $33.6 trillion at last estimate, so, say, a 1% decline to the current increase in crime would cost $330 billion. Or it could be, say, that the urban half of the population has lost 2% and the less urban half has gained 2%.
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