“Despite fair
housing laws, prospective black home buyers
are still ‘steered’ away from white
neighborhoods. Low-income African-Americans
in segregated neighborhoods remain subject
to what Contract Buyers League attorneys
called a ‘race tax’ and what my father
referred to as the ‘million dollars a day
cost of being black.’ As one recent study
demonstrates, this ‘ghetto tax’ means that
the urban poor pay considerably more for
goods and services ranging from food to auto
insurance.
The most striking evidence of the ongoing
need to fight exploitative credit practices
is the recent tidal wave of predatory
lending known as the sub-prime mortgage
crisis… ‘Ghetto-lending practices of the
1960s have metastasized… We are all in the
ghetto now.”
On April 3, 1964, in one of his most famous
speeches, “The Ballot or the Bullet,”
Malcolm X said African-Americans didn’t end
up stuck and suffering in the nation’s
ghettos by accident, but because of a
government conspiracy to “deprive you of
your economic opportunities, deprive you of
decent housing, deprive you of decent
education.” The late civil rights leader
went on to conclude that the government was
“responsible for the oppression and
exploitation and degradation of black people
in this country.”
45 years later, we now have a book chock
full of evidence confirming many of
Malcolm’s allegations, especially in terms
of the real estate concerns. Family
Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the
Exploitation of Black Urban America was
written by Beryl Satter, the daughter of a
liberal Jewish lawyer who had dedicated his
career to representing poor black folks
being ripped off by a rigged housing market
which favored whites while discriminating
against blacks.
The basic problem was that the Federal
Housing Administration (FHA), from its
creation in 1934, had a policy of refusing
to insure mortgages in any African-American
or integrated communities. Consequently,
aspiring black homebuyers were routinely
denied mortgage assistance and ended up
dependent on unscrupulous lenders who
resorted to a host of predatory practices
knowing that the government wasn’t doing
business with African-American customers.
Encyclopedic in scope, but narrowly-focused
on the City of Chicago where her father had
his law office until his untimely death at
the age of only 49, Family Properties
exposes as lies the conventional wisdom
which would blame black folks for their
inability to escape the ghetto and all of
its pathology. Instead, here we have proof
positive that the slums were created and
maintained by design by a racist federal
government.
A brilliant expose’ belatedly
uncovering the ugly underbelly of another
shameful, color-coded chapter of American
history.