Plundered
How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Clear. Accessible. Compelling." —Ibram X. Kendi, MacArthur Genius fellow and author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist
In the spirit of Evicted, a property law scholar uses the stories of two grandfathers—one white, one Black—who arrived in Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal how racist policies weaken Black families, widen the racial wealth gap, and derive profit from pain.
When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes.
Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atuahene uncovered a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity—a nationwide practice in no way limited to Detroit.
In this powerful work of scholarship and storytelling, Atuahene shows how predatory governance invites complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerates communities, and widens the racial wealth gap. Using a multigenerational narrative, Atuahene tells a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they flourish, and who profits.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grossly inequitable taxation policies have led to Detroit's foreclosure crisis, according to this meticulous study. Property law scholar Atuahene (We Want What's Ours) draws on decades' worth of property records and over 200 interviews with homeowners and real estate investors to prove there has been systemic overtaxation of Black homeowners in the hundreds of millions of dollars when compared to white homeowners ("Of the 63,000 Detroit homes with delinquent tax debt in 2019, the City overtaxed about 90 percent of them," ). She shows that the systemic origins of this imbalance are not only an opaque property tax system that keeps homeowners from understanding why they are being taxed, but overtaxed Black homeowners' lack of access to agencies that could advise them on their options for appeal (unlike white homeowners, who Atuahene depicts as plied with such advice). Atuahene suggests that such obstacles are baked into the system, in order to entrap the uninformed and, in Atuahene's astute perspective, to cause an "enormous transfer of wealth from homeowners in this majority Black city to government coffers." Coupling her statistical analysis with profiles of two families—one African American, the other Italian—since their arrival in Detroit in the early 1900s, Atuahene evocatively demonstrates how inequitable taxation contributed, along with redlining and other racist policies, to the families' divergent paths. It's a vital addition to the literature on housing inequality in America.
