When black residents began to try and move, private realtors and city officials partnered to entrench racist housing policies. City planners in the 1950s and '60s reflected the fear of black expansion North and West working to implement subtly segregationist policies. Real estate boards and companies held the primary goal of maximizing property value. Social agreement decided that black populations in specific areas were bad for property value so “real estate boards, in St. Louis and elsewhere, adhered to the professional conviction that African American occupancy was a public nuisance and a threat to property values” (Gordon, 83). Realtors showed black buyers houses only in “transitional neighborhoods” regardless of a prospective buyer's price range. White buyers were steered away from those same neighborhoods. 

In the post-war era, federally, New Deal programs were implemented to “subsidize segregation” and afford white homebuyers extensive privileges. The city of St. Louis enforced these ideas through their property tax assessment overhaul. “The only ‘full value’ property in the City, by this reckoning, lay in the far northwest and southwest corners bordering St. Louis County—the latter largely protected by deed Covenants” (Gordon, 89). The result was highly discounted property in the neighborhoods with predominantly black populations and stable property values in white neighborhoods, allowing for more freedom and social mobility.