Race, Housing, and Public Policy

Whoa, the title of this post is way too ambitious. All I want to do here is mention the latest book I haven't read, "Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America," by Beryl Satter. I've read a couple of reviews of the book (see here ) and have added it to my Amazon cart (that's how I keep track of things I wish I had time to read), and here's my main reaction so far: why do books about race, housing & lending discrimination, redlining, and so on never identify or deal with the unscrupulous landlords, speculators, and contract sellers? Who were these people, and what are their stories? There's always some "passive voice" at work here--the New York Times quotes from the book, which refers to: "...fabulous enrichment for speculative contract sellers and their investors, debt peonage or impoverishment for many black contract buyers....."


So, who got rich from this terrible behavior? I fear the answer is "our family, our friends, and our neighbors." That is, it was presumably whites who lived.....where? on the north side, the northwest side, the southwest side.....or in Evanston, Glenview,......in other words, it's not some abstract intangible entity who did these things. It was people--people like me. Who were they? What were their motivations? We have oral histories, and books by historians and sociologists, mostly focused on whites who left (Louis Rosen's book) or blacks who came (Satter's book, Making the Second Ghetto by Arnold Hirsch) ....but what about the speculators themselves? Maybe not such a nice group of people--but what do we know about them? Aren't we curious? Don't we worry that some of our city's suburbs were built up by unsavory people and tainted money coming from the post-war white flight from our central city? Not to be too dramatic, but it's as if we were discussing the Holocaust and not asking the question of who actually did the bad things.

This is not to say that we shouldn't also hear the stories told by Satter and others and that we shouldn't attempt to learn from our terrible public policy mistakes (refusing to offer mortgage insurance in black neighborhoods, for example). I am a policy person at heart, myself, so I am all about trying to improve our policies. But in this instance, I find that the "numbers" and "facts" I tend to rely on are simply not enough for me to understand what went on here.

OK, I"m done! Back to my day job......