That's actually apocryphal. City-owned brownstones in Harlem were never selling for $1. Even when the area was at its worst, people were entering into lotteries to purchase them (preference given to long-standing area residents). They were at least $15K down payments, sometimes a lot more. I'm guessing they usually went for 30 or 40K. That obviously doesn't sound like a lot of money compared to what they're worth now, but for poor people it was (and still is). Not to mention extensive work that would have to go in to making an abandoned building habitable after its only residents for a decade had been rats and junkies.
The city did do transactions with developers selling vacant lots for a token amount (usually $1) but that was a formality to call it a land purchase when in actuality it was a way for the city to privatize public land that lay undeveloped--it was akin to granting contracts to developers (post eminent domain)... The city didn't want to be the developer, this was in a neo-liberal period of putting urban renewal in the hands of big corporations/real estate syndicates that persist to this day.
While black and brown people could have done more, sure, a lot of us had our backs against the corner in that era there really wasn't any chance for people who could barely put food on the table to go out there and buy up/develop real estate. Anyone who says otherwise is writing revisionist history in an attempt to denigrate a beleaguered people with the chips stacked against us in all eras.
