LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban
uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining.
Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black
city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban
Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce
mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers
equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not
been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of
predatory inclusion.
Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices
continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist
structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and
close relationships between regulators and the industry created
incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to
encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black
homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an
attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers - as if
unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing
segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage
of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to
fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure,
multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the
nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens
of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country.
The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for
realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions
of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind.
Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire
impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban
core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.
