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okay good evening let me try this again good evening thank you for you know humoring me my name is Jorden camp I'm director of research here at the people's forum and a visiting scholar in the center for place culture and politics at the CUNY grad Center and I'm really happy to welcome you here to the peoples forum hopefully some not for the first time but welcome if you're coming back I also want to thank word up books can you see word up books over here yes they have come and they have copies of my friend and colleague Ganga Yamada Taylor's new book race for profit which I'm sure they'll sell you a copy and the professor professor Taylor would be willing to sign one after I imagine okay good so thanks so much - word up for partnering with us tonight and I am really happy to host the launch of kanga Yamada Taylor's newest book race for profit how banks and the real estate industry undermine black homeownership which is out from the University of North Carolina press and I need to start by thanking the co-sponsor for tonight's event the University of North Carolina press and I'm pleased to announce that this evenings event inaugurates a series of book launches at the people's forum which we will co-host with unc press and we're delighted to be working with brandon proa and the team in this endeavor so we'll be sharing the details of those events shortly and I hope you stay tuned there'll be a lot more to come in the in the coming months also I really want to take my hat off to the TPF staff and you'll see them here working here you know I have Friz Lee Lee Anne Boleyn 1 Claudia Chris Kevin's here bernardo david vida de nada Mary Andy Bell Keys can you join me and giving them a round Plus cuz nothing happens here without their immense labor so I'm really grateful to you all and I'm last but not least delighted to introduce this evening speaker professor Qiu Matta Taylor I first met kanga in 2013 I think this is right is this when you started at Princeton 2014 okay which was the first year of your appointment and african-american studies at Princeton and I was a postdoctoral fellow there in African American Studies we're both at the time working on our first books and it was amazing to being in those conversations together which I continue to cherish we've been in touch ever since throughout the entire time I've known kinga she's been right at the forefront of debates about the relationships between race class and politics she has earned the well-deserved reputation as one of the leading radical intellectuals of our generation and managed to do so while facing serious threats in opposition by the far-right and white supremists but she's never backed down and has refused to be cowed instead you've put your shoulder to the wheel and elevating the voices of poor and working people and movements against racism and capitalism so we're very grateful for this leadership Cheng is an assistant professor of african-american studies at Princeton the author from backlight of from black lives matter to black liberation out from Haymarket which received a Lenin cultural freedom Award for especially notable book she's also the editor of how we get free black feminism and the Combahee River collective which is also out from Haymarket and received the lambda literary award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018 her work has also appeared in very prominent venues including the Boston review the Guardian Jacobean the Los Angeles Times the New York Times the Nation Paris Review Souls you write more than most of us can read she's currently a Distinguished Lecture for the organization of American Historians and the book she'll be discussing tonight race for profit has been long listed for the National Book Award for nonfiction it's truly a pleasure to welcome Karen Quebec are you for the first time here to the people's forum after all she's a people's scholar committed to elevating the visions of working people struggles and to implementing socialist futures so for these reasons and more I'm honored to host you here tonight and without further ado please join me in welcoming professor Kiana thank you just a quick note I am sick I'm actually I sound worse than I am I'm getting over a cold yet not yet over a cold so there may be periodic uncontrollable coughing but I have a large bottle of water here but that is a long way of saying I actually really want it to be here so that's why I'm here in part in large part I love Jordan Jordan camp and I really wanted to come to this to this space which I've heard a lot about but have not been here I live in Philadelphia and I'm really happy to be here to talk about this book and hopefully have some conversation about the issues regarding race and real estate so thanks to the People's forum for inviting me here and let's get started last July in an epic 'el spasm of racist vitriol Donald Trump described the city of Baltimore as a quote rat and rodent infested mess that quote no human being would want to live in it was cruel in thinly coated Vale invoked to disparage the hardship and 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 black poor and working-class communities was not evidence of african-american indifference to conditions in their neighborhoods but rats have always been markers of substandard housing that thrives in the enclosure of residential segregation the Menace and black working-class neighborhoods in the 1960s also inspired ridicule from mean-spirited white conservatives in government then and it also 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 forty million dollar bill to exterminate rents 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 had been ridiculed in the process a Virginia Republican mocked the legislation to house of laughter from other white representatives saying quote 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 the people who lived in the inner city rats were the most visceral example of the unequal living conditions forced onto black people in mid-century America and then 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 african-american mother complained to a Chicago Defender reporter that she stayed up most nights because of the rats the rats crawling in her bed which made her nervous and the rats in her children's bed which terrified her they get into the bunk beds and so I sit up all night I am miserable and afraid two days before his first birthday little Andre Addams was according to Jet magazine chewed to death by a rat while sleeping in his crib a death so shocking that more than a thousand african-americans gathered on Chicago's West Side and protest one activist recalled the prior summer's deadly riot remember watts describing in grisly detail the infant's remains he said when he lay in his crib you could see the holes where the rats had chewed the little finger on his right hand was tied on with the string Chicago health officials disagreed claiming that the child died of malnutrition but nevertheless conceding that rats had fed on the baby's corpse civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King jr. who spoke at a hastily organized protest reminded the crowd this is why we are fighting slums in Chicago 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 the children misidentified a rat as a teddy bear in the aftermath of riots in Philadelphia in 1964 a city commissioned report found that 100 percent of reported rat bites happened in segregated black majority neighborhoods housing segregation maintained through a vexing combination of white terrorist violence public policy and the exclusionary practices of the private sector ensured the dilapidated and substandard condition of black housing these were the evidence of exclusion and enclosure and they boiled over into the electricity of successive waves of uprisings across the country oh yeah I'm good a Harris poll taken in the summer of 1965 after riots in South Central Los Angeles found housing conditions listed among the top three concern of all Americans in the weeks after the uprising in Detroit in 1967 of Washington pole a Washington Post poll forcefully linked deteriorating conditions in black communities with the uprisings fully seventy percent of blacks attributed rioting to housing conditions 59 percent of blacks said they knew someone living in rat-infested housing 57 percent reported holes in their ceilings forty nine percent said their housing was overcrowded and sixty eight percent reported cockroaches in their housing in the poll even thirty nine percent of whites said they believed that the condition of black housing was responsible for ongoing rioting by the end of the 1960's 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 and as a significant source of black rage income of rage of black communities the Commission's findings called for historic changes to American housing policies a landmark Supreme Court case Jones versus 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 in comparing housing segregation to slavery arguing that quote when discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin then it is a relic of slavery the final piece of the battle to open the US housing market to african-americans came with the Housing and Urban Development Act of August in August of 1968 the 1968 HUD Act was Lyndon Johnson's last greatest 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 described their promotion of single-family home ownership for poor people as quote socio commercial enterprise or business with a conscience Johnson described the legislation as the Magna Carta for the cities and its focus on the market 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 of poor and low-income people at the heart of the legislation was a low-income home ownership plan that aimed to transform low-income renters into homeowners federal officials turned to home ownership as a cheaper program where the cost of the houses were absorbed by the program participants while the federal government paid regular subsidies to banks which kept the state's costs lower than the upfront expenses necessary to develop build and manage public housing the economic concerns also fit with the growing idea that homeownership could stabilize the anger and restiveness coursing through American cities freshman Senator Charles Percy a Republican from Illinois described the benefits of expanding homeownership as quote a new dawn of tunity on which a new national effort to bring dignity and a better life to today's swamped 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 President Richard Nixon said of the bill quote people who own their own homes don't burn down their neighborhoods rather than pride in self-interest they turn to fixing up their communities and making them liveable for themselves and their neighbors the terms of the new homeownership program were a low $200 payment 20% of a participants income as their mortgage regardless of the cost of the house and interest rates capped at 1% the inclusion of federal mortgage insurance for the first time meant that in the worst case scenario a foreclosure or abandonment the federal government was obligated to pay back the mortgage to the lenders these terms kept the prices of the homes manageable for low-income and working class people but it also removed almost all of the risk for the real estate industry as one official described the program quote 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 loans for housing to people in neighborhoods that these organizations had previously excluded or Redland but with the promise of lucrative subsidies and the guarantees of mortgage insurance and the promise of profit that came with both of them the historic hostility of these private sector forces melted away but 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 in sales to people who would qualify for the new programs the entirety the programs were in the hands of real-estate operatives HUD sent brokers lists of eligible properties when real estate brokers matched a person with a house they connected the prospective buyer with a mortgage lender the mortgage lender consulted with HUD to determine if the person qualified for the program but at no time did an individual speak and prospective buyers speak with the representative of the federal local or state government but not only could money be made by flipping cheap properties brokers found it easy to bribe poorly paid appraisers to inflate the value of 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 with expensive closing costs everyone made money except the poor black families that were disproportionately saddled with these broken homes and cities across the country the federal government's turned to home ownership was also a consummate expression of post-war racial liberalism which 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 just as it had done for white Americans with the New Deal and the GI Bill after World War Two but in narrowing their focus to access alone racial liberals overlooked the racist practices embedded within those institutions this was shockingly clear in the real estate industry banks and the real estate had played the 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 in the solution to this crisis was a recipe for disaster this obviously did not mean that black people should continue to be excluded rather it demanded greater scrutiny greater enforcement of rules regarding the protection of civil rights an
specific plans to undo the practices that had resulted in black exclusion in the first place without that level of scrutiny and the threat of behavior altering punishment there was nothing in place to prevent the continuation of those practices instead of scrutiny and regulation predatory practices continued in other words the racist exclusion of African Americans gave way to their predatory inclusion the notion of risk facilitated the charade of race neutrality as the neighborhood conditions and financial insecurity of African Americans that had been created by the racist actions and behavior of government agencies bankers and real estate brokers were now twisted into evidence that African Americans should be treated cautiously in the marketplace predatory inclusion described the different more expensive and ultimately exploitative terms upon which black people were admitted into the world of conventional real estate practices under the guise of colorblind neutrality in reality decades of color conscious exclusion created poverty in the conditions of dilapidation and deterioration and working class and poor black communities that then became the visual proof that these neighborhoods and most importantly the people who lived in those neighborhoods posed a risk to property values and loan repayment more generally predatory inclusion described the ways that African Americans were welcomed into institutions and practices from which they had formerly been excluded because there were new ways in which they could be extracted from or financially exploited in the supposed colorblind race neutral American marketplace black investment in the housing market could result in credit shattering insurmountable that with no hopes of their homes gaining value over time this of course did not mean that the homes of black people had no value black housing even in its greatest distress could be fortresses of refuge places of communion sites of connection but rarely was it the financial asset that it has been for millions of white Americans but it was this issue of value that so much of the housing market turned on the key to the American dream of homeownership was not just simple possession of property but just as important was whether the value of that property would rise over time increasing the owner's equity in a society with this anemic social welfare state the boost and home values were determinative of one's quality of life the ascending value of a home could help finance a college education in unforeseen health care or financial crisis or contribute to a comfortable retirement but homes did not ascend or descend in value on their own terms the surrounding neighborhood and the value or lack of value of other buildings businesses and institutions helped determine whether a neighborhood was good or bad in the United States value was also shaped by whether a property owner was white or black surrounded by other white people or surrounded by black people there is a perception in our society that value is intrinsic tangible real we know what has value when we see it just as clearly as we understand the lack of value when we see it but in this way value within the housing market is socially constructed a strange alchemy of race place and the perceptions of the buying public or a sociologist Alton calmly put it property values are where culture meets economics Frederick M Babcock considered an originator of real estate appraisal wrote in his seminal book the appraisal of real estate quote it is an it is an obvious it is obvious that there is no absolute ironclad method of computing real estate values because values are a social phenomenon dependent upon human behavior the intensely subjective process of determining the value of property or a neighborhood what I would refer to as the pseudoscience of real estate appraisal was inherently informed by the presence or absence of African Americans the American Institute of real estate appraiser said as much when it's professional Manuel maintained that quote the clash of nationalities with dissimilar cultures contribute to the destruction of value when a new class of people of a different race color nationality and culture move into a neighborhood old inhabitants think that the neighborhood is losing desirability thus the intensity of anti-black racism in American society was inevitably wound into these notions of property value neighborhood and community value the assumption that African Americans were harmful to property values drove the desire to keep them segregated and excluded it justified their marginalization in the housing market it offered a common-sense explanation for the disproportionate conditions of dilapidation distress and substandard housing largely owned by white people and rented to black people this difference in value in white housing compared to black housing produced attention between exchange value and use value in housing or more intimately the difference between real estate and a home these contradictory objectives of real estate and a home one a commodity and the other intimating a place of below also reinforced reactionary racial norms and deepened the perception of dual housing markets working at dual purposes mid-century narratives of normative whiteness embodied in conceptions of the suburban based nuclear family shaped the perceptions of home as an expression of use value within white communities conversely developing narratives concerning perceived domestic dysfunction within black living spaces whether that conception was based on non normative family formations or poverty or dilapidated living structures cast black dwellings as incapable of achieving the status of home thus reducing them to their base exchange value where white housing was seen as an asset developed through inclusion and the accrual possibilities of its surrounding property black housing was marked by its exclusion in isolation where value was extracted not imbued these racialized narratives of families communities and their built environments reinforced and naturalized the segregative practices among real estate brokers mortgage bankers in the white public indeed these perceptions of insurmountable difference steeped in the permanence of blood race and culture constituted the underwriting criteria that determined who was to be excluded and who should be included in this way segregation was profitable value accrued to white housing the further it was the further away it was from african-americans in their neighborhoods but value could also be found in segregated and distressed housing for black people only the value did not flow to the black homeowner black people functioned as vessels through which capital flowed from enclosed black neighborhoods out to banks and real estate operatives real estate can find each group to its own chin of a single housing market to preserve the allure of exclusivity for whites while satisfying the demand of housing for african-americans this was evidence not of a dual housing market but of a single American housing market that tied race to risk linking both to the rise and fall of property values and generating profits that grew into the sinew that bound it all together white housing and white neighborhoods did well because black housing and black neighborhoods did not a white housing market would have been unintelligible without its black counterpart both relied upon the other to make each legible this reality exposed the thinness of American liberalism where inclusion alone was offered as the palliative to the rigid structures of white supremacy that held the market the governing institution and the law itself together the collusive relationship between the public and private sector in the production of public policy housing policy undermined the potential for inclusion to make meaning of black citizenship these limits became starkly clear with the new Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 consider the experience of Janice Johnson on September 18th 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 black single mother on welfare and living with her eight-year-old son in a decaying apartment in a building that had recently been condemned by city officials in philadelphia now facing eviction she needed to quickly find a new place to live when johnson found an apartment for rent in the same neighborhood she called the landlord in anticipation but johnson's hopes were dashed when he told her that she could not rent the apartment because she was well fare recipient the landlord however quickly pivoted from offering a rental to suggesting that Janice Johnson buy a house in the same neighborhood as a welfare recipient Janice Johnson qualified for one of HUDs new low-income home ownership programs and was able to purchase a house with an FHA back loan for $5,600 within a matter of days but within weeks Janice Johnson realized that her home was not the fulfillment of the American dream it was the beginning of her American nightmare within days of moving into her new house the sewer line broke spewing waste water all over the basement floor the electricity for the house was sporadic and haphazard there were holes and other irregularities in the foundation of the home the compromised structure of the house was not the worst of it on Halloween night Johnson's son woke up to find a rat in his bed Janice Johnson saw rats running throughout her house including in the kitchen and bathrooms she called the agent who sold her the house to complain about its condition he sent workmen out on a couple of occasions and they even patched the foot 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 homeowners business miserable and dangerous housing conditions like these in the existing urban market led people to walk away from their homes that they had recently purchased and the number of defaults foreclosures and FHA insurance payments began to rise by the end of 1973 10% of section 235 one of the homeownership programs created by the 1968 HUD Act were in foreclosure along with tens of thousands of more homes and other FHA assisted low-income home ownership programs in May of 1974 HUD was in possession of 78,000 single-family homes that had been foreclosed upon congressional investigations into impropriety in the homeownership program showed that federal appraisers were taking bribes and inflating the value of dilapidated houses by three or four times their actual worth local mortgage bankers were also accused of accepting bribes to ignore inconsistencies in paperwork needed to authorize home loans newspaper reports and hundreds of federal indictments identified local FHA officials appraisers real estate agents and mortgage lenders is all involved in the swindle in cities as diverse as Chicago Detroit Philadelphia Seattle San Jose and Columbia South Carolina in East New York Brooklyn FHA officials real estate brokers and mortgage bankers were arrested and indicted for a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud by 1974 twenty-eight HUD officials had been indicted for their role in the housing scandal along with other mortgage brokers and real estate brokers the FBI by the end of 1974 had opened 1930 active investigations into impropriety in the HUD home ownership programs the crisis in the crises in these programs coincided with an end to the long post-war economic boom that had been the foundation of the American Dream instead by the end of 1973 unemployment was on the rise as was inflation creating the economic conundrum of stagflation the onset of recession the deepest since the 1930s had created a political opportunity to roll these programs back by stoking the racial resentment of white suburban aides and the perception that these programs were for undeserving African Americans this opportunity helped to shape the political climate that allowed the knick in administration to implement their long-held plan to shift power back to the states when it came to the distribution of social welfare the overriding objective was to unravel the Johnson welfare state and replace it with revenue sharing Block Grants an advantage Enda of local control of the distribution of social welfare funds for cities and states and while there had been bipartisan support for low-income homeownership the mounting scandals were becoming a political problem advocates and other elected officials had argued that there should be less emphasis on existing housing and more of a focus on building new homes in cities to give african-americans more better and cheaper housing options but this was certainly not in Richard Nixon's plans not after he had carefully cultivated the white silent majority coalition made up of disaffected white suburban aides who fought to keep their communities exclusively white the growing spectacle of scandal and mounting foreclosures within the HUD home ownership programs generated the momentum for the right to attack on housing policies the political attacks were of course not confined to housing but the entire social welfare state came into question these programs had largely been won in part to the insurgent black movement that had helped to redefine poverty and inequality in an inequality and link them to the exclusive policies of the state rampant discrimination and capitalism itself from the march on Washington insistence on jobs and freedom to Malcolm X's link between capitalism and racism to Stokely Carmichael coining the phrase institutional racism - the Black Panther party's anti-capitalist and anti colonial framing the black movement had clearly identified the foundation of black inequality and poverty - the the system itself and in doing so they had called for the need for programs to address this kind of structural inequality to effectively undermine these programs then the right attack the participants is undeserving ungrateful and ultimately untrustworthy for the HUD homeownership program this meant demonizing the poorest of the program participants as undeserving recipients of HUD subsidies and mortgage guarantees the effort to encourage low-income home ownership among African Americans was then castigated as a bizarre as a bizarre and naive exercise in social engineering as an Ohio congressman Tom Ashley tartly argued quote you cannot run a middle-class program in the ghetto members of Congress and news reporters turned their attention to the poorest participants in the program black women on welfare who had been aggressively targeted to become homeowners these women many of whom had been recruited from deteriorating public housing complexes were particularly vulnerable to buying homes that were in poor shape because they were desperate for housing for themselves and their children but when questions surfaced about the condition of the housing as an act of self-preservation HUD investigators linked the discretion like those of Janis Johnson to the home making skills of black women in one hearing in 1970 discussing the growing problems in the homeownership programs HUD secretary George Romney the liberal Republican former governor of Michigan complained quote in the case of lower income families you have many who have not had the responsibilities of homeownership previously and therefore there is a great tendency on their part to not undertake the work necessary to maintain a home some officials were even more explicit in their attack Georgia congressman ben blackburn said quote the problem is that we have been putting families into homes who have no sense of responsibility of homeownership and that is where the problem has been and that is the intrinsic problem of the program we found welfare mothers whose sole income was aid for dependent children plus other benefits that come from that status in life and they were put in housing presumably as owners and yet they could not even fix a faucet washer have we concluded that there are some people who should not be put in the status of home purchaser can we not conclude that there are some people who do not ha
e the sense of responsibility to own a home of course there was the undeniable irony of rich white men in Congress who relied upon black women as maids and caretakers for their families now complaining about their home making skills but there was a larger issue focusing on black women's housekeeping abilities deflected attention from the more pressing question of why the FHA in HUD were insuring properties in uninhabitable condition after all an earlier audit of HUDs homeownership program concluded quote no homeowner can be expected to cope with poor construction cracked foundations improper wiring and a general failure of contractors to meet local building and maintenance requirements it is important to say that black women were not just victims of this kind of abuse and it was really their willingness to seek out help and use the resources of legal aid societies to engage in litigation that the criminal aspects of this program of these programs came to light in the first place by the mid-1970s especially in Philadelphia black women were at the helm of important grassroots organizing efforts to make HUD and the FHA fulfill their promises to repair the broken houses that had been sold to them on the watch of those organizations other activists also rejected this kind of victim blaming one homeowner turned activist in Chicago described the desert the devastating effects of HUDs failed program she described the devastating effect of HUD's felt felt programs as quote 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 is an outright plan and the government the Realtors and the big-money people are making lots of money out of changing neighborhoods out of the communities that we call home but Nixon officials were able to use the spectacular fraud and corruption of HUDs home ownership programs as evidence that the government should get out of the business of housing poor and low-income people the highly visible collapse of the low-income home ownership programs not only raised questions about the role of the state and housing people but it also allowed officials to gain support for keeping poor and working-class black people out of white suburban communities in January of 1973 in his last act as HUD secretary George Romney announced a national moratorium on the construction or funding of all federally subsidized housing programs including all of the FHA assistent low-income home ownership programs months later Nixon would tell Congress quote all across America the federal government has become the biggest slumlord in history leaders of all political persuasions and from all levels of government agree that the federally subsidized housing approach has failed instead he suggested of the policy alternatives available the most promising way to achieve decent housing for all of our families at an acceptable cost appears to be direct cash assistance this was the beginning of the federal turn to section 8 housing vouchers first issue in 1974 the introduction of vouchers was coupled with the demand from the Nixon administration that the existing housing stock be used for low-income housing existing housing was understood to be in cities it existed it did not need to be built it was not new meanwhile the Nixon administration secured three billion dollars for the construction of new low-income housing of loot new low-income homes that were all too but guaranteed to be built in the suburbs and largely reserved for white people with existing housing in the cities for black renters using section 8 vouchers and new construction in the suburbs for white buyers Nixon segregated vision for housing in the United States was fulfilled in closing when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980 he called for HUD to convene a special Commission on housing policy for more than 30 years more than 30 years after pledging to provide decent homes for all of its citizens the federal government and its Department of Housing and Urban Development continued to fail to achieve this goal the latest Housing Commission paneled by Reagan called its report to house a nation and it began with a criticism of the 1968 HUD act the hood act had left as its legacy quote a belief in the potency of government programs Reagan's Commission on housing promised the opposite quote the genius of the market economy freed from the distortions forced by government housing policies and regulations that swung erratically from loving too 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 how the the HUD act and the reasons behind its demise Lyndon Johnson had also promised to unleash quote the genius of private industry as the key to unlocking the perpetual the mystery of perpetual housing crises but lacks today's achill management erratic regulations and trenchant racial discrimination bind with the end of redlining and the predacious inclusion a formally excluded black urbanites allowed the real-estate industry to bleed inner cities dry it was not government intrusion that st. the FHA assisted low-income homeownership program 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 home ownership programs undoubtedly were they are clenched in a dance of conflict as magnanimous as the as the titans of business who argued for socio commercial enterprise in the 1960s tried to prevent present themselves in the end the objective of profit-making outpaced the necessity for safe and sound housing one glaring reason for this spoke to the heart of the conflict real estate profits were rooted in residential segregation there is a tendency to view the post-riot city is trapped in the stasis of blight and in the inevitability of decay over time but the late 1960s and 1970s were actually defined by changing political social and economic dynamics and the quote unquote inner city was at the Nexus of these processes new financial instruments such as mortgage-backed securities produced an intense demand for more homeowners and more money for home financing while lacks oversight and regulation incentivize unscrupulous and predatory targeting of urban communities far from being a static site of dilapidation and ruin the urban core was becoming an attractive place of unparalleled opportunity a new frontier of economic investment and in extraction for the real estate and banking industries the race for profit in the 1970s transformed blighted urban space into what one u.s. senator grabbed as they quote golden ghetto were profits for banks and real estate brokers were never ending and shattered credit and ruined neighborhoods where all that remained for black people who lived there these are not just important historical lessons but they have direct bearing on the neighborhoods and communities we live in today housing policies over much of the 20th century and certainly the housing crisis of the 1970s contributed to the uneven development of black urban and suburban communities in comparison to white urban and suburban communities the geographic scars created by the HUD FHA crisis where nearly 80,000 single-family homes were repossessed but hundreds of thousands of more multifamily units also went into foreclosure exacerbated a crisis of abandonment that animated the optics of distress and dilapidation a generation later these conditions became the basis for designating a place and the people who lived there as subprime for more than 50 years now the private sector has been viewed as the most capable of ending the persisting housing crisis and yet those crises have become even more stark over time creating even greater degrees of housing precariousness this is especially true in the realm of homeownership the acceleration of subprime lending in the atmosphere of deregulation in the late 1990s and early 2000s resulted in unprecedented home losses for African Americans the practice of supplement subprime lending was contingent on racial practices and assumptions across the housing industry and among the general public the Cascade of foreclosures and mortgage defaults further eroded the value of properties in black communities once again hollowing out the notion of homes as assets for African Americans the net loss of more than 240,000 houses for black people has created the pretext for mortgage lenders to once again engage in exclusionary practices that marginalize potential black homeowners but this is only one aspect of the crisis the recurring perception of risky black buyers has opened pathways for the re-emergence of naked predatory practices in the real estate market from rent-to-own schemes to the reappearance of land installment contracts in lieu of conventional mortgages real estate continues to pilfer african-americans in search of their American Dream in the housing market it is not history repeating itself it is the predictable outcome when the home is a commodity and continues to be promoted as the fulfillment and meaning of citizenship thank you thank you very much and we have time to take a few questions yes thank you that was awesome Thanks I'm curious a little bit about who was occupying those urban spaces before the period that you discussed so was it or was it always historically black neighborhoods or was it mostly like immigrants who were later coded as white and then where were they going in that process I mean by the the so the the great migration of african-americans happens in two waves there's the kind of early teens of the 20th century through the 1920s about a million black people move from the rural South into cities but then in the post-war the pre-war black people are moving into industrial centers for for jobs so really from 1940 to 1970 about six million african-americans move from not just rural to urban but from south to north and so this is part of as part of a dynamic that leads to what is described as blockbusting so by you know by the 1950s these are basically white people who had been living in cities the federal government begins to subsidize white suburbanization in the the 1930s but it really doesn't take off until the post-war period so you know the game is block-by-block moving busting white people out of their homes meaning that in many cases you have real estate operatives go into a white neighborhood that borders a black neighborhood offering a below market price for the house and then threatening that if you don't take it you know I'll come back Tuesday with a lower price I'll come back Wednesday with a lower price you see the blacks are coming and you'll take what I give you or your property values were crater completely and so they sell their houses low and then African Americans who are overcrowded in black tightly constricted black belts who are desperate to get some space and move by high you know so Claude Ross who is featured the kind of featured person in Tana has psychosis Coates 2014 piece on reparations he talks about this process of contract planning in Chicago I had interviewed Claude Ross in 2007 and Claude Ross described how the house that he purchased a white family sold it to a real estate broker for $8,000 and it was resold to him about a month later for $18,000 and so that that's how neighborhoods flipped and so white people could take that and then go buy a new house in the suburbs and then you know black people are left in these houses that are in disrepair because one of the things that the FHA also excluded from cities was not just the big home loan but they also excluded people from small home repair loans right so the things that you need to keep up the maintenance in your home that was available to white people in the suburbs was not available two black people in cities so or two white people who lived in cities at this time so these houses were incredible distress in disrepair they were old and this was the housing market that that African Americans were operating in during that time I went to ask your concept on community trusts land for us Community Land Trust because I feel that that is taking a position opposite to the answers you know like Nehemiah Nehemiah housing or anything like that it's so I'd like to get your opinion on that and then I'd also like you to comment since you mentioned mr. Coates I will also heard him to a report that if you looked at the wealth that people have if I get it right the amount of wealth that we have in the equity in our homes is equal to the amount of wealth at the time when people were when there was slavery the amount of wealth in homes the amount of equity and all Americans have okay you know you take all the Americans and you say how much wealth is attributed to the homes and then he said at the same time if he took like in 1860 the amount of wealth attributed to enslaved people to the wealth they had and enslaved people it was the same I'm talking about wealthy because this your conference this whole thing about housing really has to do with the wealth that this whole construction of Trant is transfer of wealth as you're saying transferring wealth to white people so what was the first part oh you know everyone loves community interest I'm not one of them I think I mean I I appreciate the idea that you can take a piece of land and you know control the terms upon which people live on them which is that you know I mean that the whole point is that you set up terms that don't allow for this kind of gross profiteering that means that the property remains affordable over a long period of time I mean I think you know that that's a good idea the problem though is that the way that I see how this ultimately will function or my concern is the ways that that can reinforce segregation in the isolation of african-americans and Latinos primarily for whom this is offered up to as a solution and so you know I see it not it's not the same but when you know these presidential candidates suggest that as a kind of repair to redlining we're gonna allow people black people who have lived in formerly red land areas to purchase homes in those areas what does that mean right so I live in Philly and you know take for example East German town well you can buy a house in East German town for $50,000 you can do that but I don't know what that means for you to buy a house for $50,000 in East German town that house is not going to appreciate over time there's still no real job market in East German town and so there's this strange idea that you know if you get people to buy houses there then somehow that area will develop in and of itself regardless of the previous 70 80 year history where that has not actually happened it's supposed to magically happen and instead this is really about tethering people to places to keep them from going other places and so I think that you know it's a long the right track but I'm interested in moving the discussion I think that we have to rethink we have to rethink the idea of private property in the meantime that's a big idea in the meantime we have to get the market out of the the question of housing and that's a big idea - but I think that you know that's kind of where we're at with things right I mean we're talking about you know healthcare is a human right education as a right that you know we say that an educated citizenry is the foundation for democracy then why do we have to pay for it you know the human species needs health care so why do we have to pay for it well we know that people need shelter to live I mean it's one of the food water shelter is one of those things that people have to people have to have so why don't why are we paying for it and it seemed you know four years ago these ideas Vermont right oh you know you want free health care and a free pony rid
best cute and now it's you know it's a starting point even if you don't like it you have to have something credible to say about it and so I think that you know we can put housing in removing the state from housing out of it out of that conversation for the the wealth transference I mean yes the you know housing is the greatest source of the financial accumulation of personal wealth in this society and so black exclusion from that historically and recently and I think I just I have people saw that news day expose about Long Island this is we're not talking about ancient history real estate racism banking this is like right now like two days ago right now so the ex-black exclusion either from homeownership or even when black people get access their homes being valued less their neighborhoods being valued less his meant that black people have ten times less median wealth than white people and the reason why that matters is that we live in a country with no real social welfare state and so it's people's access to homeownership and that wealth that is presumably generated from that that determines your quality of life that unleashes social mobility and it's a kind of embedded inequality in our society because if you don't have access to homeownership then you don't have your own personal welfare state that finances all of these things that you need to actually be able to get ahead you know whether it's a college education whether it's being able to withstand an unforeseen healthcare crisis or whatever it is if you don't have access to it you know you're you have a different kind of existence and for black people even when you do have access to it it functions differently it does not accrue in value in the same way I use this example and I lived in Chicago longer than I lived anywhere else and in Chicago there's a neighborhood Bronzeville in Bronzeville is the sort of near south side of the city south side meaning a largely black area and so in the six oh six five three zip code there are new construction houses that go anywhere from 400,000 to $600,000 blocks away from Lake Michigan beautiful houses but if those houses were five miles north they would be worth 1 million dollars and that is the difference of property in white hands and white neighborhoods and property in black hands in black neighborhoods so we should stop connecting social mobility access to the good life to having this axe asset when it functions so differently based on race in this society okay so I will take two more questions there will be the last two questions because we want you to be able to get cuz then BAE okay um do you have a remedy for this problem because I haven't heard yeah I mean my remedy is as complex I think that there are many things one is the the most immediate thing is the federal government should enforce its own rules and regulations regarding racism and discrimination in the housing market which the latest examples from Los Angeles are just the latest example of how it doesn't do that so that that would that would be a good starting point for the Trump HUD led by dr. ben Carson right okay but the second thing is is more complicated as what I kind of ended the the talk on which is the incompatibility of private sector objectives and public sector objectives and so the problem a big problem that we have in this country is that the federal government has completely divested itself from producing housing of you know of any variety and so it has outsourced that entirely to the private sector well the private sector's objective is to make money in housing in the real estate right the game buy low sell high like that that is real estate and so there's a reason why there has never been a you know an abundant source of affordable housing because it's it's not profitable it is not profitable to house poor and working-class people it is profitable to build condos for millionaires to build four thousand square-foot you know micro mansions that is where the profit is it's not profitable building housing for working class people and yet we have a situation where it is constantly outsourced to the private sector to do just that and so it never happens and you know to try to you know create some incentives there showered with tax breaks that you know okay so you'll put three affordable units in your you know building and you put 16 in your bill I mean we're talking about scale the scale of crisis around housing affordability requires that the state takes this on because there are tens of millions of people who are what the federal government describes as housing and secure whether they are paying more than 30 percent of their income or in at least 18 percent of the cases paying 50 percent or more of their income to house themselves and so we have to get the market out of out of this housing for people because it makes it impossible to actually create the the number the the level of housing that is necessary and this is why the whole issue with the involvement of the the private sector is also a problem because when the federal government relies is dependent on the private sector to create this housing they can't regulate it you know this isn't a partnership this is a dependency and you can't there's no regulation because if you regulate too much maybe they don't want to do this anymore maybe they don't want to partake in these programs and then what right I mean this is part of the reason why there are no adequate building inspections because you actually might find something so in Philly there are thousands of apartments that have been legally designated unfit for human habitation and they house tens of thousands of people because if the city actually went in and enforced the building code what would happen they'd have to shut those houses down and then where all these people in code they might show up in your neighborhood and so you know we all just the city officials just look the other way and allow this to happen we do the market has to get out of the housing the the housing issue in this country and so that's I mean that's a solution but you know that's that's why we need that that political revolution Bernie is talking about because we need a massive social movement I make any of that possible we have last question good Eve start good evening thank you so much for sharing your insight um so far um my name is Albert Scott and I'm from East New York in Brooklyn and I'm with the group called Coalition for community advancement in our community homeowners are witness basically three stages of as I call housing warfare you highlighted the red lining you highlighted the subprime lending and the toxic loans but then the third war is what we identify is the zoning war it's what you actually ignited speculation deed theft deed fraud and majority of homeowners and communities such as East New York and Brownsville they may be equity rich or language but they not liquid rich on that particular end so the question that I have to ask of you is understanding that specific dynamic the homeowners that survived and want to upgrade their property the banking relationship is not there so down they are forced to go to the loan depots and the mr. Cooper's of the world for their loans so the court so the question is how do we put in your research and throughout your travels what type of modifications is needed with I don't know what the Community Reinvestment Act to help to put pressure and changing to add teeth to it or what other type of action step you feel that may be needed in order for the community such as Brownsville in East New York which is under attack do the zoning war could remain and have a fighting chance because again the homeowners majority either are retired or approaching retirement and any increase in speculation trigger property taxes and have that financial shock thank you yeah I mean that that's that's a that's an important that's an important question there's a book about zoning that is is really focused on New York that's an excellent book called capital cities by Sam Stein nice so that would be the first thing you should do study groups in your in your group on the book I think that you know this is it's it's complicated because I mean I teach public policy at Princeton right so I know that the the the public policy game is is usually giving people some quick Pat answer that if if we just do this thing then that will you know unleash something and it's not true like these what I'm talking about are deeply systemic practices that are very difficult to undo because they're ingrained in how the society actually functions and so what I'm suggesting is not an easy Pat answer I don't have a quick oh here's the solution everybody mail a postcard here and then let's wait for it to happen really the only space that any of us have ever seen that has created something approaching equity in housing has come through social movements and organizing and that that can be a frustrating answer because there's not you know the the social movement I love the grocery store where you just go you know pick up one and there it is they have to be they have to be built but if we look historically the most significant changes in housing have come in the 1930s when there were things called rent riots when you know landlords had the audacity to be evicting people during a Depression when people's entire source of income had been completely wiped out and that's how we got public housing that actually functioned it wasn't enough but the model worked in the 1930s business spent the next thirty years trying to destroy it because they didn't want competition with the private marker with the private marker market either in the rental market or the buying market and then in the 1960s it's the riots that produced money and financing for housing that forced the federal government to innovate new means to house people that were flawed because it's working with flawed tools so when HUD is formed if you go look at the congressional hearings that talk about the formation of HUD it is assumed from the beginning that HUD is a tool for private enterprise like they repeat this over and over again so it's conceived that was it called the Department of Housing and Urban Development because the builders demand it was first gonna be the department the Department of Urban Development but the builders intervened and said no we want to focus on building new housing and they demanded that their name be first that housing be listed first in the name of this new cabinet Department that's created in 1965 and so that's difficult from its inception right it's baked in its baked into the way that all of this works so it doesn't mean that we can't do anything and I like I said I've come here from the east coast from I was in the East Coast though Chicago now back on the East Coast but I was in Chicago for a long time and in Chicago you know black organizing and social movements broke the contract system right and so this created the means by which black people had access to conventional mortgages before that you had to buy your like rent to own you had to buy your your house on installment huge interest rates highly exploitative you're treated like a homeowner you've pay property taxes maintain the house but if you miss a payment you treat it like a renter and evicted and lose all of your investment but a social movement of black homeowners broke that system now it's replaced with a different kind of pernicious system but it shows that the people have the capacity to intervene in these in these matters one of the the things that came out of that struggle that was long lasting was that there were no tenant protections during this time which is how many of these homeowners were so easily evicted so one of the things that came out of that struggle were tenant protections that are some of the strongest in the country that continued to exist to this day it is incredibly difficult even though they do it to evict tenants in in Chicago they get away with it because people don't know what their rights are they don't know that they have rights but they have many rights that were actually won during this struggle and so these are kind of disparate and episodic examples but that's that's what it's been like to struggle around questions of housing but we have to this these things are going to change when we create enough pressure that they cannot continue to govern in the ways that they are used to governing and that's you know that's not a quick easy answer but we didn't actually get into this situation in quick and easy ways so thank you [Applause] I want to remind you that word up has copies of race for profit available please do buy a copy get a signed copy that's what enables us to keep doing events like this thank you so much for coming and can you join me in thanking [Applause]
