Race for profit How banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership

In this meticulously researched and well-written volume, Taylor (Princeton Univ.) 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. Focusing on the period 1968--1974, Taylor explores FHA/HUD's ill-fated effort to leverage home ownership as a means to quell urban riots in the late 1960s, and to mitigate the rat-infested housing conditions spawned by previous disinvestment. Abetted by what Taylor views as a racist real estate industry, HUD's black home-ownership schemes, particularly those developed under former Michigan governor George Romney, proved not only scandal-ridden but dysfunctional and cruel. In exposing how Washington allied with the real estate industry to exploit poor, black, often female seekers of decent shelter in a squalid urban wasteland, Taylor's work replicates in part Matthew Desmond's incisive study of Milwaukee: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (CH, Sep'16, 54-0449). This important contribution to our understanding of the black urban experience would be very useful in Afro-American and urban studies courses, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals. --John F. Bauman, emeritus, University of Southern Maine

U.S. policy took a critical turn in the 1970s, from creating public housing to encouraging African Americans in low-income communities to purchase homes, explains Taylor (African American studies, Princeton Univ.; Rats, Riots and Revolution). Ending decades of redlining that restricted black homeownership, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) joined with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to launch an unprecedented public-private partnership with bankers, builders, and real-estate brokers in order to buoy a virtually unregulated multibillion-dollar urban housing market on the backs of poor and working-class subprime borrowers. The shift propelled skyrocketing profits for the real-estate industry, but it was hardly uplifting. Persisting practices that Taylor describes as "predatory inclusion" spread racial discrimination by failing to protect black buyers in housing markets, in which they ended up paying more for less amid expanding segregation and unfair housing laws. VERDICT Essential for readers wishing to understand the depth and differentials of U.S. racial discrimination, Taylor's masterly exposé of the political economy of the racially bifurcated market systematically lays bare how residential segregation made profits from race; it also illustrates the mismatch of market solutions to racist policies and practices and underscores the limits of legislation alone to undo institutional racism.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe