The negro real estate dealer frequently offers to the owner of an apartment house which is no longer renting advantageously to white tenants cash payment for a year’s lease on the property, thus guaranteeing the owner against loss, and then he fills the building with colored tenants. It is said, however, that the agent does not put out the white tenants unless he can get 10 per cent more from the colored people. By this method the negroes now occupy many large apartment buildings, but the negro real estate agents obtain the reputation of exploiting their own race. [Sidenote: =Lodgers a Necessity=] High rents among the colored people, as everywhere else, force the families to take in lodgers. Nearly one-third of the population in the district investigated on the South Side and nearly one-seventh of the population in the district investigated on the West Side were lodgers. While this practice is always found dangerous to family life, it is particularly so to the boys and girls of colored families, who are often obliged to live near the vice districts. To quote from the report, “The history of the social evil in Chicago is intimately connected with the colored population. Invariably the larger vice districts have been created within or near the settlements of colored people. In the past history of the city nearly every time a new vice district was created downtown or on the South Side, the colored families within the district moved in just ahead of the prostitutes.” [Sidenote: =Difficulties of Buying Property=] When it becomes possible for the colored people of a better class to buy property in a good neighborhood, so that they may take care of their children and live respectably, there are often protest meetings among the white people in the vicinity and sometimes even riots. A striking example of the latter occurred within the past three years on the West Side of Chicago; a colored woman bought a lot near a small park, upon which she built a cottage. It was not until she moved into the completed house that the neighbors discovered that a colored family had acquired property there. They immediately began a crusade of insults and threats. When this brought no results, a “night raid” company was organized. In the middle of the night a masked band broke into the house; told the family to keep quiet or they would be murdered; then they tore down the newly built house, destroying everything in it. This is, of course, an extreme instance, but there have been many similar to it. Quite recently at Wilmette, a suburb of Chicago, animosity against negro residents resulted in the organization of an anti-negro committee which requested the dismissal of all negroes who were employed in the town as gardeners, janitors, etc., because the necessity of housing their families depressed real estate values. [Sidenote: =Housing of the Well-to-Do Colored People=]