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.