Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Justice, Power, and Politics)

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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY\nBy 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.\nRace 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.\nNarrating 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.\nReview
Details bungling mismanagement, gross corruption, distorted incentives, civil rights regulations that went unheeded and unenforced -- what Taylor calls a system of predatory inclusion that was distinct yet not entirely free from the racist system of exclusion that preceded it.--
The New York Times\nLike many historians, Taylor stays close to the history she documents and doesn't set out to address the present day in a sustained or direct way. She doesn't propose a solution to these perpetual abuses, and certainly not a neat, bipartisan policy move. In her telling, the problems are deep and abiding. They have to do with the degree to which the American Dream has become synonymous with the big yet also small accomplishment of owning a house.--
The New Republic\nIn this meticulously researched and well-written volume, Taylor . . . highlights an important chapter in African American history, focusing on how mortgage bankers and the FHA turned the promise of black home ownership into an urban nightmare, ultimately reinforcing historic urban-suburban racial segregation.--
CHOICE\nTaylor lays bare the naked racism, unethical practices, and rampant profiteering that saturated all aspects of the federal government and real estate industry's treatment of Black America.--
Planning Perspectives\nAmong the myriad strengths of
Race for Profit is Taylor's thoughtful and poignant analysis of the structures of meaning that undergird the racialized political economy of homeownership in this period.--
H-Net Reviews\nNarrating 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.--
Democratic Left\nTaylor grounds her analysis in extensive archival research and in conversation with the historiography that it both ex