Transcription
Today, I am excited to introduce Ganga Yamada Taylor, who will be discussing her book *Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership*. Listed as a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Taylor's most recent book is a necessary examination of how home ownership is inextricably tied to social justice issues for Black American communities.
Drawing from years of research and extensive archival evidence, Taylor outlines a history of Black homeownership from the late 1960s to today, paying particular attention to exploitative practices from the private sector. She shows how even attempts at reform have disenfranchised Black Americans. *Race for Profit* provides an important historical background on housing discrimination and offers new perspectives on present-day issues related to Black homeownership.
Ganga Yamada Taylor is an assistant professor of African American Studies at Princeton and the author of the book *From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation.* Her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, and The Paris Review, among others. In addition to her work as a writer, editor, and educator, she is also an outspoken activist for Black Lives Matter.
We are so happy to have Ganga Yamada Taylor with us today to discuss *Race for Profit*. Please join me in welcoming her to Politics and Prose. [Applause]
"How's everybody doing? Good! I just got off a train. Thank you for having me. So, what I'm going to do is I want to thank the bookstore for inviting me to talk about the book. It just came out last Monday, so hey, this is like the sixth talk that I've given in the last week. But I appreciate the opportunity to come talk about it.
It’s a difficult book to pull things out of, so I'm going to try to give a narrative arc of the contents and the kind of main points of emphasis for me in the book, and then hopefully that will open up some discussion. I actually don't mind if people make comments. I don't proclaim to be the unending fountain of all knowledge. So let me just get started and see where we end up.
Okay, last July, in a now typical spasm of racist vitriol, Donald Trump described the city of Baltimore as a “rat and rodent infested mess” that “no human being would want to live in.” It was cruel and thinly veiled code invoked to disparage the hardship in Black working-class communities of that city. In doing so, it also conveyed a fatalistic disregard for those conditions while expressing a decided lack of ambition to actually attend to something as serious as rodent infestation.
Despite Trump's rhetoric, rat infestation in poor Black and working-class communities is not evidence of African American indifference to conditions in their neighborhoods. Rats have always been markers of substandard housing that thrives in the enclosure of residential segregation. The menace of rats in Black working-class neighborhoods in the 1960s also inspired ridicule from mean-spirited white conservatives in government then, and it sparked activism and even uprisings.
In August 1967, nearly two weeks after riots in Detroit prompted the rare deployment of federal troops in an American city, dozens of demonstrators burst into the chamber of the House of Representatives chanting, "Rats caused riots." Days earlier, Congress had rejected a two-year, $40 million bill to exterminate rats in inner cities across the United States. The protesters sat in the gallery of the hall for 20 minutes, repeating the slogan "We want a rat bill."
The previous attempt at passing the bill had not merely been voted down, but also had been ridiculed in the process. A Virginia Republican mocked the legislation to howls of laughter from other white representatives, saying, "Mr. Speaker, I think the rat smart thing for us to do is vote this rat bill down right now." One of his colleagues mocked it as another civil rights bill.
No laughing matter for people who live in the inner city, rats were the most visceral example of the unequal living conditions forced onto Black people in mid-century America. In the 1960s, African American media regularly reported on rat attacks on the most vulnerable members of Black urban households, children.
Lorraine Mukesh, a single Black mother, complained to Chicago Defender reporters that she stayed up most nights because of rats crawling in her bed, which made her nervous, and the rats in her children's bed, which terrified her. She was quoted saying, "They get into the bunk beds, and so I sit up all night. I am miserable and afraid."
The rat infestation in Black neighborhoods was profound. When African American children in a Chicago neighborhood were given a vocabulary test and asked to identify various familiar objects, more than 60% of them misidentified a rat as a teddy bear. In the aftermath of riots in Philadelphia in 1864, a city-commissioned report found that 100% of reported rat bites happened in segregated Black majority neighborhoods.
Housing segregation, maintained through a vexing combination of white terroristic violence, public policy, and the exclusionary practices of the private sector, ensured the dilapidated and substandard condition of Black housing. By the end of the 1960s, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, had left no doubt that substandard housing evidenced by rat infestation was a recurring factor in the annual bouts of riots that roiled American cities throughout the decade.
Identifying segregation at the root of those conditions as a significant source of rage in Black communities, the Commission's findings called for historic changes to American housing policies. A landmark Supreme Court case, *Jones v. Mayer,* decided just weeks after the passage of the Fair Housing Act in the spring of 1968, drew upon the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Thirteenth Amendment, comparing housing segregation to slavery. It argued that, “When racial discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin, it is a relic of slavery.”
The final piece of the battle to open the U.S. housing market to African Americans came with the Housing and Urban Development Act in August of 1968. The 1968 HUD Act was Lyndon Johnson's last great legislative accomplishment. It was a bill planned in collaboration with representatives from private enterprise and what was known as the Kaiser Commission. The businessmen who participated in their promotion of single-family home ownership for poor people described it as socio-commercial enterprise, or business with a conscience.
Johnson would go on to describe the legislation as the “Magna Carta for the cities,” but its focus on markets and ownership ensured that it was a bipartisan bill. For decades, federal officials had relied on public housing to shelter poor and low-income people.
But by the end of the 1960s, public housing had become politically untenable, with endless jousts over its maintenance, location, and inhabitants. Housing for the poor suffered from a mixture of government neglect and shrinking tenancy, a result of the dangerous conditions endured by residents and the constant pressure for such housing to exclude anyone other than the poorest tenants.
The HUD Act was a pivot away from the notion of public or state responsibility for housing poor and low-income people. At the heart of the legislation was a low-income homeownership program that aimed to transform low-income renters into homeowners. Federal officials turned to homeownership as a cheaper program, where the cost of the houses would be absorbed by the program participants while the federal government paid subsidies necessary to keep the cost down.
This meant that the federal government could make payments over time, as opposed to the upfront expenses necessary to develop, build, and manage public housing. These economic concerns also fit with the growing idea that homeownership could stabilize anger and restiveness coursing through American cities.
Freshman Senator Charles H. Percy, a Republican from Illinois, described the benefits of expanding homeownership as “a new dawn of opportunity on which a new national effort to bring dignity and a better life to today's slum dwellers must be based. We can democratize our cities; we can give people of the ghetto a piece of the action; let them be somebody and achieve something.”
Richard Nixon said of the bill, "People who own their own homes don't burn their neighborhoods. Rather, in self-pride and interests, they turn to fixing up their communities and making them livable for themselves and their neighbors.” The terms of the new homeownership program were a low $200 down payment, 20% of a participant's income as their mortgage regardless of the cost of the house, and interest rates that were kept at 1%.
The inclusion of federal mortgage insurance for the first time meant that, in the worst-case scenario of foreclosure or abandonment, the federal government would step in and pay back the mortgage to the lenders. These terms kept the price of the homes low and manageable for poor and working-class people. It also removed almost all of the risk for the real estate industry. As one official described the program, "It's like doing business in heaven; you can't lose money."
The unprecedented program linked federal agencies to real estate brokers and mortgage bankers to supply the loans for housing and loans to people in neighborhoods these organizations had previously excluded or redlined. But with the promise of lucrative subsidies and the guarantees of mortgage insurance and the promise of profit that came with them, the historic hostility of these private sector forces melted away.
However, these same conditions also opened new pathways for corrupt real estate practices. Speculators and brokers bought up cheap, dilapidated properties, hoping to flip them for higher prices and sell homes to people who would qualify for the new programs. The entirety of the program was in the hands of real estate operatives.
HUD and brokers provided lists of eligible properties, and when real estate brokers matched a person with a house, they then connected the prospective buyer with a mortgage lender. The mortgage lender consulted with HUD to determine if the person qualified for the program; at no time did an individual speak with a representative of the federal government or any state or local agency.
Not only could money be made by flipping cheap properties, but brokers found it easy to bribe poorly paid federal housing administrator appraisers, bribing them to inflate the value of the houses in the new urban market. Bankers made money on the front end of the real estate deal by securing the loan in the first place, and then they made money on the back end of the deal through expensive closing costs associated with selling the property.
Everyone made money except the poor Black families that were disproportionately saddled with these broken homes in cities across the country. One homeowner-turned-activist described this collusion in the following way: she described it as the “outright murder of our neighborhoods in America, aided and abetted by the Federal Housing Administration, the mortgage industry, the insurance industry, and the unscrupulous real estate industry. These four institutions are working together to systematically destroy what’s left of America’s cities. What for so long has been considered a natural phenomenon—changing neighborhoods, deteriorating cities—are not natural; it’s an outright plan. The government, the realtors, and the big-money people are making a lot of money out of changing neighborhoods, out of the communities we call home.”
The federal government's turn to home ownership was a consummate expression of post-war racial liberalism that viewed inclusion into American democracy through the vehicles of citizenship law and free-market capitalism as the key to unlocking equality and social mobility for Black citizens, as it had been for White Americans through the New Deal and the GI Bill after World War II.
But in narrowing their focus to access alone, racial liberals overlooked the racist practices embedded within these institutions. This was shockingly clear in the real estate industry; banks played a central role in creating the urban housing crisis exemplified by the persistence of rats in Black housing.
So, the sudden involvement of these same private sector forces was a recipe for disaster. If rat infestation in the 1960s was evidence of racial segregation and substandard housing and a catalyst for rebellions throughout the period, then their appearance in federally subsidized homes owned by Black families in the 1970s punctured the delusion that simply transforming redlining into inclusion within a housing market built upon an edifice of racial discrimination, exploitative practices, and segregation could produce an equitable and just outcome.
Instead, with minimal oversight and a steadfast sensitivity to the bottom line of the real estate and banking industries, the search for safe and sound housing foundered in foreclosures and abandonment. Consider the experiences of Janice Johnson.
On September 18, 1970, Janice Johnson bought her first home in Philadelphia with a mortgage guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration. By all previous standards, Johnson was an atypical buyer; she was a single Black mother on welfare, living with her eight-year-old son in a decaying apartment in a building that had been recently condemned by the city officials and was now facing eviction.
Johnson needed to quickly find a new place to live, and when her mother told her of an apartment for rent in the same neighborhood, Johnson called the landlord in anticipation. But her hopes were dashed when he told her that she could not rent that apartment because she was a welfare recipient. The landlord quickly pivoted from offering a rental to suggesting that Janice Johnson buy a house in the same neighborhood.
Janice Johnson purchased the house using the Section 235 housing program created by the Housing and Urban Development Act, and quickly, within weeks, Johnson realized that her home was not the fulfillment of the American dream but the beginning of her American nightmare.
Within days of moving into her new house, the sewer line broke, spewing wastewater all over the basement floor. The electricity for the house was sporadic and haphazard. There were holes and other irregularities in the foundation of her house.
The compromised structure of the house was not the worst of it. On Halloween night, Johnson's son, Edward, woke up to find a rat in his bed. Janice saw rats throughout her house, including in the kitchen and bathroom. Apparently, the holes in the basement harbored nests of rats that regularly entered the house. She called the agent who sold her the house to complain about its condition, and he sent workmen out on a couple of occasions, and they even patched the failing plaster in her dining room.
But soon after, the real estate agent reminded her that the problems in her house were now her own. They were what he described as “homeowner's business.” For Janice Johnson, the new terms that allowed her and thousands of other women like her to buy new homes were predatory inclusion.
Predatory inclusion into the real estate market was evident when Black buyers were granted access to conventional real estate practices and mortgage financing, but on more expensive and comparatively unequal terms. The disproportionate conditions of poverty and dilapidation, produced by years of public and private institutional neglect, became evidence of why Black buyers should be considered risky and thus treated differently within the housing market.
Black buyers were also vulnerable to ongoing predatory practices because of the ways that residential segregation persisted, maintaining African Americans as a captured market and making them vulnerable to price inflation and exploitative real estate and banking practices when it came to securing housing.
More generally, predatory inclusion describes the ways that Black people were welcomed into institutions and practices from which they had formerly been excluded, but there were new ways in which they could be extracted from or financially exploited. Miserable and dangerous housing conditions in the existing urban market led people to walk away from the homes they had recently purchased, and the number of defaults and foreclosures in FHA payments began to rise.
By the end of 1973, 10% of Section 235 homes were in foreclosure, along with tens of thousands more in other FHA-assisted low-income homeownership programs. In May of 1974, HUD was in possession of 78,000 single-family homes that had been foreclosed upon, with hundreds of thousands of others in limbo in the status of default, meaning that they were a few payments away from being in foreclosure.
Congressional investigations into impropriety in the homeownership program showed that federal appraisers were taking bribes and inflating the value of dilapidated houses by three to four times their actual worth. Local mortgage bankers were also accused of accepting bribes to ignore inconsistencies in the paperwork needed to authorize the purchase and sale of particular houses.
Newspaper reports and hundreds of federal indictments identified local FHA officials, appraisers, real estate agents, and mortgage lenders as all in on the swindle. These were not just scandals but crimes that had been committed against poor and working-class Black people in cities as diverse as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, D.C., Seattle, San Jose, Columbia, South Carolina, and beyond.
Real estate brokers, FHA officials, and mortgage bankers were arrested and indicted for a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud. By 1974, 28 HUD officials had been indicted for their role in the housing scandal, along with other mortgage brokers and real estate brokers. The FBI had another 1930 open active investigations into fraud in the HUD housing programs.
But instead of focusing on the corrupt practices of the private sector at the heart of these programs, policymakers scrutinized the homemaking skills and housekeeping abilities of Black women. The racist discourses of unfit Black mothers marshalling the perceived domestic dysfunction in Black households guaranteed the ease with which the blame for the decline of these homeownership programs could be attributed to the apparent ineptitude of Black single-parent led households.
Elected officials, media, and the racially resentful white public were more than willing listeners. So even as hundreds of mostly white men were arrested or indicted for criminal acts of fraud and corruption within the HUD homeownership program, George Romney, the former governor of Michigan who was also the Secretary of HUD at that time, insisted that “housing by itself cannot solve the problems of people, particularly those people,” he added, who “may be suffering from bad habits, lawlessness, laziness, unemployment, inadequate education, low working skills, ill health, poor motivation, and a negative self attitude.”
By 1974, in Romney's last act as secretary, he imposed a national moratorium on all subsidized housing programs right in the midst of the end of the long U.S. economic boom that had been in place since the end of World War II and the onset of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.
Nixon then used the HUD crisis to pivot towards a new Section 8 housing voucher program but fully divested the federal government from low-income homeownership. The discriminatory best practices of the real estate industry had made it resistant to change in adhering to new fair housing legislation.
The benignly named public-private partnerships obscured the ways that the federal government became complicit with private sector practices that promoted residential segregation and racial discrimination. Selling dilapidated homes to poor women who could not afford repairs like Janice Johnson reinforced the idea of unfit Black owners who posed a threat to the quality of a neighborhood and its property values.
When the federal government guaranteed Johnson's mortgage, it became implicated in the shoddy business practices of private sector agents bent on profiting from the desperation of low-income urban residents. Racially informed real estate practices were not the actions of an industry impervious to change or old in its ways.
Instead, racial discrimination persisted in the new market because it was good business.
In closing, when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he called for HUD to convene a special commission on housing policies. For more than 30 years, after pledging to provide decent homes for its citizens, the federal government and its Department of Housing continued to fail in achieving its goal.
The latest housing commission, paneled by Reagan, called its report *To House a Nation* and began with a criticism of the 1968 HUD Act. The HUD Act left as its legacy “a belief in the potency of government programs.” Reagan’s Commission on Housing promised the opposite: “the genius of the market economy, freed from the distortions forced by government housing policies and regulations that swing erratically from loving to hostile, can provide for housing far better than federal programs.”
It was a conclusion that could only be reached by ignoring the actual origins of the HUD Act itself and the reasons behind its demise. Lyndon Johnson had also promised to unleash the “genius of private industry” as the key to unlocking the mystery of perpetual housing crises. But lack of today's Achilles' management, erratic regulations, and trenchant racial discrimination combined with the end of redlining and the predatory inclusion of formerly excluded Black urbanites allowed the real estate industry to bleed inner cities dry.
It was not government intrusion that sank the FHA-assisted low-income homeownership programs, it was government negligence. But this malfeasance was not just an issue of poorly motivated personnel; it was the outcome of mismatched objectives and impossible tasks.
When public policies are guided by the objectives of private enterprise, as the HUD homeownership programs undoubtedly were, they are clenched in a dance of conflict. As magnanimous as the Titans of business, who argued for socio-commercial enterprise in the 1960s tried to present themselves, in the end, the objective of profit-making outpaced the necessity for safe and sound housing.
The end of explicit racist exclusion assured a period of predatory inclusion, where the segregated housing market continued because it was profitable. The end result has meant perpetual housing insecurity for African Americans and the persisting racial wealth gap between Black and White families.
The key to this is not the endless promotion of property ownership but unhinging social mobility and life chances from ownership of an asset whose value is largely determined by deep-seated notions of race, culture, and belonging. Those attributes in the American housing market have twisted value in such ways that it accrues when in the hands of White buyers and sellers and declines in the hands of Black buyers and sellers.
This is the race for profit, and yet another example of the inherent racial inequality embedded in American capitalism. Thank you. [Applause]
Okay, questions?
*Things Dave Zirin*:
“Yes, I think it’s two things. One, the housing insecurity of a disproportionate number of Black people could instantly be solved if the federal government actually enforced its own rules and regulations regarding redlining discrimination in the private market. But that has notoriously been under-enforced, if not completely ignored, from the beginning. So at the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, a civil rights division was created for HUD housing, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And when new offices are created, the best opportunity that they have for decent funding from federal government appropriations is when they are first created.
But in this case, the Civil Rights Division was created with a $6 million budget, $5 million of which went to staffing and setting up the office, which left $1 million for 120 agents to investigate all claims of racial discrimination in housing in the entire United States. On its face, that is an unserious effort to actually enforce the laws.
But I think it's important to say that this isn't just an issue of malfeasance or irresponsibility or just not doing their jobs properly. Part of what I'm interested in looking at is how the relationship between public and private sector forces creates a reluctant and hesitant approach to enforcing civil rights rules and regulations, and part of it stems from a basic understanding that there are two sets of objectives when you match these different interests together.
The entire purpose of the private sector forces in housing and real estate is to make money; that’s what real estate selling, buying, and selling is for. The purpose of the public sector is, presumably, to protect the public's interest, to protect public welfare. Profiteering and the public's welfare and interest do not go together, and we see this clash and conflict repeated throughout the course of these programs and throughout programs thereafter.
Why was public housing so poorly organized and maintained in the United States? Because the private sector didn’t like it, and the private sector had much more influence over policymakers than any public housing inhabitant ever had. The private sector did not want competition with its efforts to sell homes or rent to people in the private market.
This contributes to the particular character that public housing has. I’m trying to draw attention to the conflict of interests inherent in these public-private partnerships that are always introduced as new and innovative and the most efficient way to accomplish these public policy goals. The end result of this relationship has undermined the ability of the federal government to enforce its own rules regarding discrimination in the housing market, because when it completely offsets the responsibility for producing, managing, overseeing in any capacity housing for poor and low-income people—as our government has done—it has almost no direct investment in housing, in public housing as it did or any sort of low-income housing for working-class people as it did prior to the '68 bill.
Then it means that instead of a partnership, the federal government is actually dependent upon private sector forces to produce this housing, which again warps its ability to adequately enforce its own rules and regulations.”
*YES — Where is Chicago?*
“Yeah, where? Okay, I came from Chicago too. Yeah, so actually, I think that there are a fair number of housing organizations that work with HUD to promote home ownership, and a big point of emphasis is doing counseling for prospective homeowners. I think there have been various studies showing that people who do counseling are better prepared for some unforeseen things that come up.
But I think that even with that, there are bigger problems that I'm hoping we can also begin to look at, which is to say that even if you are fully aware of your rights as a homeowner, that still doesn’t necessarily prepare you for the uncertainty that comes up as a homeowner.
It’s difficult to own a house under good circumstances because things always happen that are unforeseen. It is very difficult if you're on a fixed income, a very fixed income, as many of the women who are welfare recipients that I write about were, to then have to deal with a boiler suddenly not working. So you can be knowledgeable about what that means and who you need to address to go about fixing it, but you either have the money to fix it or you don’t.
And so that raises a question about prescribing homeownership as an anti-poverty program: saddling people with tens of thousands of dollars of debt as a way to solve poverty with homeownership. I think the second thing, which I think in some ways is even more important, is why do people buy houses?
There are lots of different reasons why a person might buy a house, but in the United States in particular, where we have almost no social welfare state, the house becomes the way to unleash social mobility. Your ability to own a house may mean the difference in whether you can finance your child's college education. It may mean you have the ability to weather an unforeseen financial crisis.
It may ensure that you have some quality of retirement. And so because we don’t have a state that guarantees any of this, we live in a country that guarantees us nothing. You have a right to live; you have the right to work, and that’s it. You don’t have the right to health care; you don’t have the right to food; you don’t have the right to housing; you have the right to nothing in this country.
So your ability to own this asset can make the difference in the quality of your life, whether you have a quality of life or you don't. Yet, in so many ways, it reflects the rank inequality in our society. I mean, think about the fact that 40% of Black people are homeowners, and it’s a number that is precipitously dropping. It’s the lowest it has been since the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968.
That in and of itself says that 60% of Black families are missing out on this benefit that you get when you own a home. So for those 40% of Black people who do own houses, we have to look at how a house in Black hands functions differently from a house in White hands. Black properties are valued consistently as having less value than property in the hands of White people. Black neighborhoods are seen as less valuable.
These aren't just subjective ideas; this gets reflected in the market. The proponents of the free market like to talk about the market as this colorblind, neutral space where all things can happen, and in fact, the market and notions of value are socially constructed. What does that mean in an inherently racist society? It means that the market reflects that racism back at us, so that Black housing means less in comparison to White housing.
So even when Black people have access to housing, it doesn’t function the same way. That means we have to think about creating avenues for social mobility that don’t rely on your ownership of this asset. What would it mean if we had universal health care? What would it mean if we had universal access to a college education? What would it mean if we had access to all these other things that could imbue our lives with value?
Then it would make owning this house much less of a necessity. So I think that part of what I'm trying to do is get us to think beyond the existing framework for housing—the existing kind of almost reflexive reaction that we should all be homeowners and we should all be promoting homeownership.
And it doesn’t mean then relegating Black people to the rental market; it means rethinking how we distribute these social services and public services that create a quality of life for people that are unhinged from ownership to this access that not everyone has access to, and even when they do, it reflects the same kind of inequalities that pervade our society.” [Applause]
“YES, someone’s using the microphone. I’m supposed to tell you to use the microphone. Thank you so much for coming to D.C. It’s lovely. I’m super excited to read the book, and I’ve had a couple of friends who saw you at a housing conference in Princeton last year, ten years ago. Yeah, it was good.
So I’m super excited! One of the most striking things to me about the mortgage crash of 2007-2008 was how it, you know, almost overnight wiped out billions of dollars of Black wealth. Yes. And then under the logic of the same underlying events wound up in the distribution of millions of dollars in assets to the CEOs and shareholders of financial institutions, creating basically a complex mechanism of accumulation by dispossession.
Did you see anything similar in your research on this earlier stage of exploitative lending?
I think what happens in 2007-2008 is just on an exponentially larger scale because one of the things that happens in the programs that I look at is the way that the 68 HUD Act basically privatizes Fannie Mae, which was a national banking process that purchased mortgages for the sake of drawing more money back into the housing market.
So it privatized that but created the same kind of process for low-income homes. But the mortgage-backed securities that come out of the '68 bill are really, in some ways, still relying on domestic-based long-term investors, like life insurance companies, in particular.
What happens with the deregulation in the 1990s and early 2000s is that it is drawing from international sources of capital on a much larger and broader basis, which brings in exponentially more money into the process.
So I think that where there is a kind of link between the two periods is that the crisis in the programs is manipulated by the right in such a way as to kind of blame the disproportionate number of Black participants in the urban program, but also use this as evidence that government interference doesn’t work, what they describe as government interference.
They argue that government programs don’t work, so we need to let the market rip. It becomes evidence, like in that Reagan Commission report that I talked about at the very end of the talk, that becomes the foundation upon which arguments for deregulation happen in their first iteration in the Reagan administration but are then picked up by the Clinton administration as well.
So there’s a bipartisan effort to attack the legacy of the Johnson welfare state and this notion of big government that is not wholly rooted in the collapse of these programs, but they were responsible for a lot of the visual optics of urban crisis that exists in the 1970s, which becomes the evidence for why these don’t work.
The second link is the way that the concentration of foreclosures and abandonment, specifically tied to these programs, helped to lay the basis for declaring those neighborhoods, communities, and areas as subprime.
This is devaluation over a long period of time because of the loss of the housing stock and the proliferation of empty lots. Those become the evidence of why those areas are subprime and why the people who live there and want to borrow money are risky.
So that’s the link between the two. Even if the practices weren’t as lucrative as they were to become, it kind of greases the wheel and demonstrates a set of practices that allow for the exploitation of African Americans under new colorblind conditions. This is post-Fair Housing; this is post the bevy of civil rights laws of the 1960s.
So the U.S. has worked to take race out of the law, and this is kind of a forerunner to how to deploy these predatory practices without invoking race as they had done in the previous period with redlining, contract selling, and all of that. This was new ways to implement that, then take on a new life when there is significantly more capital involved in the processes a generation later.
Thank you. And you should read *Home Wreckers*, Erin Glance’s new book; it’s called *Home Wreckers*, and then there are about 25 words after that that I just can’t… The—I mean, it’s a woefully long title, but it’s an excellent book that talks about the 2007-2008 crisis in the way that corporate landlords are benefiting from that today, and that one of the reasons why the rates of Black homeownership are dropping is because the homes on the cheap end of the spectrum have been purchased by these corporations and flipped out of the home selling market into the rental market.
So they’ve become high-expense rentals for Black families who are being once again excluded from mortgage money. *Home Wreckers*—it’s a great book.”
*YES*—so a couple questions. Could you just, because it’s fascinating to hear, mention that Civil Rights Act of 1866 again?
“Yeah, what did it mention? Something about that in particular regarding real estate or home ownership? Or what was your quote?”
What was the quote you gave this?
“So the 1866 Civil Rights Act is the first declaration of civil rights in the United States. Prior to that, the rights of citizenship had never been enumerated. There was the expectation that citizenship was for white men, but what it meant was assumed as part of the common law—like what practices were involved in citizenship.
So when Black people, after the Civil War, were no longer slaves, they actually had to spell out what it means to be a citizen, and part of that is the right to buy and sell property.”
*The other thing was, you mentioned Romney. What date was that that he canceled and twisted the economy into a downward spiral?*
"It’s January 8, 1973, when George Romney imposed a moratorium on all subsidized housing programs at the bequest of Nixon."
*So I mean, he left because I had been watching the real estate since the 1950s and seen this transition. So what you’re saying, all this was purposeful? And now we see this deregulation and everything tumbles more? And now we see how they got all the property, and now they take advantage of the investment?*
“It doesn’t help when the federal government is infested with predatory corporate landlords. I mean, any of these problems that we have discussed can only make them worse.
Because, in some ways, it's an important point, because you know the boorish, Neanderthal-like behavior of Trump and these… I mean, the language that could be used to describe them—their terribleness can become seductive to just say, ‘Oh well, we just need to get back to normal. We just gotta get some respectable, well-meaning, well-educated people back into office.’ You know, like, we just got to get some decent people like Barack Obama back into office.
There’s a certain seduction to that when, every day, you just hold your breath and say, ‘What new low in human depravity will emanate from the Oval Office today?’ You know? But we have to also remember that the previous eight-year period—things were not so wonderful that we didn’t have the emergence of a Black Lives Matter movement; we didn’t have the explosion of an Occupy movement.
We didn’t have the radicalization of young people who voted for Obama like they had never voted for anyone before, only to be confronted with the disappointment of the kind of death grip on the status quo. I think this is an opportunity, and I’ll just say that for me, one of the reasons why the campaign of Bernie Sanders is so exciting is because it feels like it’s an opportunity to actually do something substantively different and not just continue the slow, plodding march to health that you know the Democrats or Republicans are paving the way towards.
It means that we have an opportunity to think radically different about doing things. In the same way that there’s a new discussion about health care—that we have a right to health care—a discussion that Sanders and other people who raised four years ago were ridiculed and told, ‘They just want to get free stuff and pony rides,’ right? Now it is the centerpiece; it is a starting point for the discussion.
The same thing with college education; we say that access to college makes for better citizens, makes for more informed people, then why are we paying for it? This should just be a basic aspect of human society.
A new discussion has opened up around that, cancelling the trillion-dollar debt of student loans. Many of us walk around with our student loan tumor, right? You know, mine is $70,000; how much is yours? Everyone walks around with it, and they organize it in the same way that they organize mortgage debt, where unless you come into a windfall amount of cash, you can’t pay it off.
They don’t let you pay off large chunks of it; they nickel and dime you to death with these student loans, and it’s strangling a generation of people who could otherwise be making productive contributions to the economy. Because of this, even in the midst of what is seen as a good economy—right? Donald Trump tells us how low Black unemployment is again. The economy is great! Yet at the same time, millions of people are open to a socialist running for president because even in the best of times, it’s not working.
I think in that same context, we can think about housing in a different way; we can think about housing as a human right and something that people are entitled to. People should not be—should be entitled to live in safe and sound housing, and their ability to function otherwise in society should not be hinged on whether or not they are a property owner.
It should just be something that you have a right to, as well as these other aspects of social life.” [Applause]
“I’ll just leave it at that.”
*Fellow South Sider from Chicago*:
“I’ve seen a lot of change. I grew up during the time that your book is about, and I go back to visit my family and see what’s happened since the crisis. In the ten years since the crisis, I see a neighborhood that is now integrated. Now, you know, who really has a race? Those really hard to answer questions?
*Morgan Park, okay!?* It’s really erased those lines, not only the Black/White lines, but also lots of LGBTQ. A lot of different people in the neighborhood.
Whereas we didn’t used to have that. Superficially, it looks like progress, but tell me where Chicago is still missing?"
“Well, they won’t give their teachers a decent contract. All that to describe paying teachers as a bailout.
No, you know, I think that Chicago, with a lot of cities, I mean, in Chicago, the big story is that tens of thousands of African Americans are actually leaving the city because it’s so inhospitable.
About 200,000 Black families or Black people since the last census in 2010 have left the city of Chicago. Some of them have gone to the South surrounding suburbs, but many of them have left the area altogether.
So I think, you know, part of this is the focus of the previous city regime of Rahm Emanuel, that now it appears somewhat to be continued by Lori Lightfoot. That focuses on this kind of bizarre growth perspective, that if you invest all of the tax dollars in the central business district—the loop—and a handful of mostly White neighborhoods that cater to young White professionals, that that really will be the key to turning a city around.
I’m sure that probably sounds familiar here. I live in Philadelphia; it certainly is the story there. You get a city that the disproportionate weight of services and political focus goes towards what some might call the gentrifying areas of the city.
Then the working-class neighborhoods get completely neglected because the city is no longer conceived of as hospitable for them. So you end up in these absurd situations where, in Chicago, you’ll spend $6 billion for the Lincoln Yards development that’s already in a rich neighborhood and then complain that Chicago Public Schools—which 90 to 90% of the students are Black and Latino—want a bailout!
You know, they want a handout? And the idea that there should be a nurse in every school, that there should be a library in every school, and that the library should have a librarian is seen as profligate! You know, how dare you?
And in Philadelphia, you know, I live in a middle-class neighborhood with a public school that White people don’t mind sending their kids to, but this building is so old and decayed that it’s a good school, and a teacher in that building had mold that was so bad that it began to grow on her sinuses, inside of her face. She had blood poisoning as a result and had to go on sick leave to get part of her sinuses removed and to deal with her blood infection.
This isn’t a good school; there are schools in worse conditions. There’s a high school in Philadelphia that has been shut down for two weeks because of asbestos poisoning. A teacher in that building has been diagnosed with cancer related to asbestos.
So they’ve shut the school down, and they have nowhere to send the students. It’s a high school! This is the problematic thing, and housing in many ways reflects that: the absolute worst aspects of it.
Because there are no controls on pricing, the cost of housing gets increasingly more expensive. It is one of the main things that are pushing working-class Black and Latino families to the city’s margins, out of the cities.
60% of Black people now live in the suburbs because of this dynamic, and these are issues that are not going away quickly. I think it’s important to understand their history and to understand their origins and how that history manifests itself in the contemporary crisis that we are trying to figure out and respond to.
And so check out my book. Thank you!” [Applause]