4.0
Race for Profit
ByPublisher Description
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.
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities45 Reviews
4.0
“So the content of this book is really important. This is one area we are referring to when we talk about institutional racism and how damaging it is. In this case, the institution being the housing market - and this is from the loan officers to the appraisers to the loan officers to the actual federal government. And of course, this is not one of those instances where the market was racially motivated while the government sat back and didn't take action. No no, they were active participants, as evidenced by actual FHA and HUD documents.
The book is well researched and well cited and does a really good job of laying out the racist behavior of various layers of the housing market and how that not only impacted the families trying to own their own home but also how public perception was spun to blame the low income (namely black) families rather than anyone involved in the harm being done to them and their communities.
However, the book is written as an academic paper which is not necessarily a bad thing because it is very information packed, but it does make it less accessible to people not used to or not interested in reading a book of that style. Additionally, the book spends a lot of time going through the absolute racist behavior of the housing market over several decades, but keeps it to that. The author holds back on the long term individual and generational repercussions of these practices - for instance how owning a home that is under water means you cannot sell it while you have a loan, and as governing bodies continue to neglect improvements in low income neighborhoods, selling it even after the loan is paid in full is extremely difficult. Entire families were often trapped in houses that were falling apart as they had nowhere else to go. Taylor also focuses on several cases that were taken to court without emphasizing how often these issues don't go to court because the families don't know that they have cases or because they don't have the resources to do so. This is true even today.
Overall, a well written non-fiction on a heavy and important topic.”
Nicola Forbes
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Doris Morgan Rueda
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