Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America

by Beryl Satter

Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago -- and cities across the nation

The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation.

In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population.

Family Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America is a monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America.


"Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North."—David Garrow, The Washington Post

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Social Justice, Sociology, American History, Politics

787 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 17, 2009

Reviews

[Clif · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book brings a complex subject to life with the intimacy of a child longing to know the truth about the life of her father, struck down by a heart attack when she was small.

Her search for truth frames a larger search for justice by the African-Americans who were denied their rights in the Chicago of 1950 on into the last years of the century. We meet the clergy and the lawyers (her father a pioneer among them) who sought to make the means of funding property ownership color-blind.

In the racist 1950's taking advantage of blacks was as easy as shooting ducks in a barrel.

It worked like this: Thousands of blacks arriving from the South needed a place to live. Whites were terrified of the arrival of the blacks and shrewd property speculators fanned the fear by warning whites that blacks were going to move into their neighborhood.

Whites, whether racist or not, were afraid their homes would decline in value so they'd take the offer of the speculator (known as a block-buster) to sell and flee. Then the speculator would turn around and sell the same home to blacks, for more than he paid for it.

The key to the scam was the fact that blacks could not get mortgages. Banks simply would not loan money to blacks regardless of their credit-worthiness. This meant all blacks could do was to buy "on contract", a pay-as-you-go scheme that gave no equity until the home or apartment building was paid for in full.

During all the time that a black resident was paying on contract, the contract seller could, if even one payment was missed, throw the resident out and begin the contract process again with another victim.

This system, made possible by the ability of the FHA to discriminate, helped to create a ghetto where, even with the best intentions, black residents were paying so much simply to stay in a place that there was nothing left to maintain it. That was another trick of contract sellers - bring in housing inspectors and have the owner kicked out for failing to maintain the place.

The author's father was just about the only person who found this system unconscionable and he drove himself to his death through the stress it brought, as he valiantly tried to defend those upon whom everyone else felt quite free to prey.

I found the book fascinating, not only for the personal accounts but because I was a youngster living in a nearby suburb at the time, blissfully unaware of what was going on. All I remember is newspaper pictures of white people with faces distorted with hatred and rage.

The whole story is here, including the attempt of Martin Luther King Jr. to bring the fight for racial equality to the North, the tensions between Jews and the African-Americans who displaced them, and the role of Hizzoner Mayor Richard J. Daley and Cardinal Cody in the sorry mess.

It was a shameful period. Though many people look back nostalgically at the 1950's, for black folks their road through the 50's was paved with the bad intentions of others who felt no twinge of guilt at fleecing the helpless. This book tells of how those helpless found a way to help themselves and stayed with the effort until lending/housing rights were won.

[I Be Reading · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ta-Nehisi Coates has talked about this book so much, I went ahead and bought it. Very glad I did. This might be the best book on systemic racism I have ever read. Because of the subject matter, it would have been real easy for this to become something boring and excruciatingly academic, but the author did an excellent job explaining everything, tying all the players together and including the human element.

I see why Coates sings its praises. Eleventy billion stars.

[William Leight · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Family Properties" is an absolutely essential book, one that hammers home, over and over again, an all-too-often neglected, yet vitally important, fact about racism: it pays. In the first (and better) half of the book, Satter lays out, by following the career of her father, crusading Chicago lawyer Mark Satter, the way in which the ghettos of Chicago -- and presumably those of other Northern cities -- were created. First comes a dual housing market, in which blacks cannot buy housing in the same ways and in the same places that whites can. This is largely created by a combination of banking racism -- banks, and Savings and Loans institutions in particular, refusing to lend to blacks -- and Federal policy, in this case redlining, the Federal Housing Administration's practice of refusing to guarantee mortgages in neighborhoods containing any black people. This latter has the beneficial side effect of increasing white racism: if the FHA won't guarantee mortgages in your neighborhood any more because a black family moved in down the street, the value of your house, into which you've put much of your savings, has plummeted. Under these circumstances, the riots that greeted attempts by blacks to move into previously all-white neighborhoods in the '50s were inevitable. Combine this dual housing market with an increasing and upwardly mobile black population, and you create a large pool of people who are desperate to buy property and so easily exploited. In the Chicago of the '50s and '60s, the main form the exploitation took was buying "on contract". A contract seller starts by getting a mortgage on a property from one of the S+L's that refuse to sell to black people, often buying the property at a discount from a white owner who is desperate to get out due to a combination of dislike of black neighbors and fear of redlining rendering his house unsalable. Then it's offered for sale to a black family at a markup ranging from 20% to 100% (if the targets start talking about bringing in a lawyer, the seller simply threatens not to sell, knowing that the prospective buyer will usually be so desperate to buy that he'll cave). The down payment is often enough to pay off the seller's down payment, with something left over, but it's the monthly payments that kill: in fact, they're so high so as to be essentially impossible, which is fine for the seller, because the advantage of selling on contract is that the seller retains the title to the property until it's paid off. Once the buyer misses a single payment, they can be, and are, evicted, with the property immediately put up for sale to the next desperate black family. After just a few years, the seller has raked in more money than the property was worth in the first place, paid off his loan from the S+L, and sold the contract to somebody else in Chicago's upper middle class. It helps, of course, to spend no money on repairs or upkeep, which the buyer can't afford either: indeed, the buyer, assuming he or she can keep up his or her payments, is essentially forced to reduce the value of the property by subdividing it (often violating building codes, though in Mayor Daley's Chicago those were essentially just there to help the building inspectors make some money on the side through bribes) and renting pieces to other black families who were equally desperate for a place to live. The result is a neighborhood with too many people crammed into ever-more dilapidated buildings; far more children than the neighborhood schools, underfunded as they are, can possibly take on, leading to children being taught in shifts and the growth of gangs; and a general lack of services. In short, a slum. But an extremely lucrative slum: Mark Satter's estimate was that $1 million dollars (1950's dollars, recall) a day was flowing from the black areas of Chicago to the property speculators they were forced to deal with, a windfall that was distributed throughout Chicago's, and probably the nation's, white elite.

The S+L's stuck with the system too long, though: by the late '60s, they were giving contract sellers mortgages on practically worthless buildings, so run-down that not even the most desperate black family would stick with them for more than a few payments. The sellers didn't care: they simply defaulted and dumped the buildings back on the S+L's. Overcome with bad loans, the S+L's would then be forced to sell the mortgages for a fraction of their value to anyone who would take them, usually the same slumlords. If they couldn't sell fast enough and went out of business under the pressure of these bad loans, the mortgages went to the Federal Savings and Loans Insurance Corporation, which was similarly eager to dump the loans to anyone they could find: again, the buyers were usually the original contract sellers, picking up the buildings -- buildings that were now worthless in large part thanks to their refusal to spend a cent on upkeep -- for a song. These worthless buildings could still generate payments, though: even if nobody would buy, the continued shortage of housing made renting possible. And when all else failed, there was arson: thanks to the Illinois Fair Plan -- which allowed slum buildings to be insured against fire for far more than they were worth, a provision intended to benefit their black residents but one that, like many such provisions, actually benefited only the exploiters -- arson became far more lucrative than renting. To avoid the negative publicity that arose from tenants dying in fires, one need merely refuse to pay for gas to hear the building in the Chicago winter: usually that cleared any remaining tenants out fairly quickly (though not always: Satter cites a 3-week period in the winter of 1969 in which three babies died in unheated apartments). And thanks to corruption in city agencies, there was no need to worry about consequences.

This description of how black Chicago neighborhoods were destroyed for fun and profit is infuriating enough, but worse was to come when the federal government took a hand. After years of steadfastly discriminating against black people, the FHA, as of 1968 no longer an independent agency and finally forced to at least pretend to care about the interests of black people, enacted the 223(e) program, which was designed to insure mortgages in "low-income urban areas", i.e. black neighborhoods. The results were, amazingly, just as bad as, if not worse than, contract selling. Widespread corruption -- FHA officials were bribed en masse -- allowed speculators to acquire decaying inner-city buildings (presumably decaying thanks to having spent years at the mercy of contract sellers) and get them appraised at multiples of their actual value. Then they need only find a sucker to buy the building with an FHA-insured mortgage at its inflated value. Of course, thanks to the dual housing market there was large pool of such people available, the working-class blacks and Hispanics who this reform was theoretically supposed to benefit. Speculators got them to sign on the dotted line for massively overpriced buildings by claiming that they had passed FHA inspection and offering a low down payment, which was sometimes even loaned to the purchasers. The sellers were utterly uninterested in whether or not the buyer could pay, routinely falsifying incomes and assets on mortgage forms. Since the mortgages were fully insured by the federal government, there was no risk to the seller, and nobody really cared about ability to pay, as the mortgage companies' profits came from the (extremely high) service fees they charged anyway. And if the borrower defaulted, there was even more money to be made: in fact, the sooner the default, the more money, as the FHA would repay the entire remaining value of the loan plus seven percent interest and service fees right away. In other words, selling to buyers who could not repay was the way to make money: it was quite fortunate for the lenders, then, that thanks to the massively inflated values of the homes they sold and their high fees, paying off the loans was practically impossible for almost all low-income buyers, especially as many of the buildings, despite having supposedly passed an FHA appraisal, were in quite poor shape. In other words, it was contract selling all over again, only on a massive scale, with some of the country's largest mortgage lenders involved. The results were devastating: the foreclosure rate on 223(e) loans was seven times that of conventional loans, leaving block after block of abandoned buildings in the inner city, the kind of urban decay problems which were often subsequently blamed on, e.g., the riots of the late '60s, but were actually due to the fact that it had become more lucrative for banks and mortgage companies to force people out of their homes then keep them there. Of course, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was responsible for paying out billions (in pre-inflation, early-'70s dollars) to the mortgage companies and financial institutions engaging in this kind of outright fraud, did nothing, given the power that said companies had over the department.

If all of this sounds rather familiar to a reader who's been following the news since roughly 2008, it should. The subprime mortgage crisis reproduced many of the same elements, in particular selling to people who the seller knew couldn't possibly afford the property they were buying -- selling aided by fraud, including deliberate falsification by the seller of the buyer's income and assets and misrepresentation of just what it was the buyer was agreeing to -- and a corrupt government ensuring that the sellers were paid in full nonetheless. If there were additional levels of sophistication added -- there were no direct bribes, and the government payouts were not the explicit goal but rather a necessary backstop for an otherwise untenable strategy -- the underlying element, of exploiting a population rendered vulnerable by racism with the federal government's help, was the same (recall that Wells Fargo, for instance, deliberately steered black families that could have afforded a prime mortgage into its subprime offerings, which were more lucrative for Wells Fargo precisely because the buyers were less likely to be able to repay their loans.). In fact, this is the most infuriating element of the book: just how little has changed.

Not that efforts weren't made: Satter documents the failures of both Alinsky and the IAF and King and the SCLC in organizing black Chicago, as well as the success of the more home-grown Contract Buyers League. But while the struggle of the CBL and the Catholic social justice advocates that worked with it is often inspiring, its victories were, in the end, fairly minimal. Individual members of the CBL mostly benefited as contract sellers, embarrassed by publicity, negotiated down their balances, but their crusade for justice ended up wilting in the courtroom, undone by unfriendly judges and a jury foreman who wanted to overturn the mess made by Brown vs. Board of Education. The only substantial victories Satter can point to are the passages of the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which are extremely weak tea indeed: the former was unable to prevent the likes of Angelo Mozilo (of Countrywide) from devastating black and Hispanic communities just as badly as contract sellers ever did, and all the latter can do is make it easier to tally up the damage. If Satter makes clear (albeit sometimes inadvertently) the bankruptcy of legislative solutions, the way government programs nominally intended to use the market to benefit poor black people all too often end up simply funneling cash to rich white ones, and the futility of relying on the Democratic establishment (even in the liberal era of the '60s and early '70s), she also demonstrates the great difficulty of organizing even the blatantly oppressed -- the IAF and the SCLC are, after all, two of the great organizing success stories of the 20th century -- and the many obstacles that stand in the way of turning even widespread collective action such as a payment strike into a tangible victory. The book makes it clear that radical solutions are necessary, but by the end of the book they seem farther away than ever. Rather than a story of victory, "Family Properties" is one of a struggle that, despite the Herculean efforts of black Chicago residents and various idealistic outsiders, still has a long way to go.

[Benjamin Dueholm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an indispensable book for those of us who were educated in a "culture of poverty" story about the economic shortcomings of the civil rights movement and the decay of inner cities. Contrary to that standard narrative (which is propagated in both liberal and conservative versions), Satter tells a story of the large-scale defrauding of millions and millions of dollars in wealth, and the degradation of thousands upon thousands of homes, through a combination of a segregated housing market, federal mortgage policies, and land-contract sales. It's an outrageous story--both the theft itself and the historical misrepresentation that ended up blaming exploited communities for the consequences of their own exploitation--and Satter tells it with vivid characterization, powerful data, and a good feel for the development of smaller stories within it. It's also about her father, a West-side landlord and radical lawyer, and her family's own complicated relationship with the racial transformation of Chicago's Lawndale neighborhood. This book is critical and everyone should read it.

[David Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his magnificent June 2014 feature "The Case for Reparations" for The Atlantic, much of the focus of his case was not so much on reparations for slavery, but instead upon the history of the institutional racism of housing discrimination so compellingly depicted by historian Beryl Satter in her book, Family Properties. In short, her work puts the lie to the pernicious "culture of poverty" theory by demonstrating how blacks were forced into the ghetto and how wealth has been systematically leeched from the black community via the housing policies and practices that resulted in the residential segregation that continues to this day. And the guilt is laid upon every level of government and society for this robbery of blacks’ lives and livelihoods: from the federal government policies (FHA, GI Bill) that actually created the phenomenon of “redlining”, to “urban renewal” policies pursued by state and local governments, to the banks and savings and loan institutions and mortgage companies that denied credit to blacks on equal terms to whites, to the unscrupulous real estate agents and contract sellers who took advantage of the situation to charge outlandishly inflated prices for substandard properties, and, finally, the average white citizens who by acts of racist terror as much as by “white flight” forced blacks into decaying inner city neighborhoods. As the recent financial crisis demonstrated, despite legislation barring some of these policies and practices, this stealing of black wealth has continued into the 21st century in modified form via the predatory practice of inducing blacks into the sub-prime loan quagmire. Satter’s book is a real eye-opener and mandatory reading for anyone who wants to know about the real causes of the “wealth gap” between blacks and whites, and anyone concerned about ongoing institutional racism and the sorry state of racial justice in America.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, but this is a hard, hard read. The author carefully (and quite readably) documents how profitable it was to create ghettos in mid-century Chicago -- and how quickly Chicago exported its expertise to the rest of the country. It's a sad, sad tale, whose primary villains are threee: (1) the FDIC, for red-lining any block with a single black resident; (2) local banks, for ignoring the red-lines to loans to profiteers but not to residents; (3) and the city's upper-middle class doctors and lawyers and such, whose money turned a tidy profit when invested in the process and so fueled the whole revolting scheme. That last is pretty terrifying, as it points a nasty finger at our own retirement plans, insurance programs, and bank accounts, all of which fueled the sub-prime meltdown by constantly demanding a higher rate of return. As some in the book states, "we all live in the ghetto now."

[Washington Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

A penetrating examination of financial discrimination. The most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North. "Family Properties" is a superbly revealing and often gripping book, one that will remind Chicagoans on temporary assignment in Washington (cough, cough, President Obama) all too poignantly of home.

David J. Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, JR., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference" reviewed it for us: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...

See also:

Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, JR., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a must read for any Chicagoan, and most anyone else, who hasn't already studied the history of redlining and housing inequality in Chicago or America. I wasn't as drawn in by the writing as i'd hoped, but overall, i really liked Satter's perspective and the range of events he covers gives an excellent groundwork from which to begin to understand the issues. part of why it was a slow read for me is that i found it so depressing. He brings events from half a decade ago alive and makes me acutely aware of how connected those corrupt policies are to housing troubles of today. And, indeed, in the last chapter he makes some astute connections between redlining and the more recent events leading to the housing crash of the 0ughts. Yes, it took me a long time to get through this book, but it was worth the investment.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

normally i do not "rate" books on this website/give everything three stars no matter what because the rating system stresses me out & also is silly, but here i will capitulate and give this the five stars it deserves. wow. when i was a first-year in college and joined the paper i work at, it handed out bookmarks with a list of chicago-centric recommended reading on one side; this was on the list. i think it is recommended reading, period. everyone should read this. it is a rich outrageous infuriating generous endlessly educational, transformative work.

[JMH · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Family Properties" tells a national story that spans decades by way of a local and personal narrative. Compelling and illuminating, individuals and communities come to life as Beryl Satter examines every facet of the uphill battles black families in postwar Chicago fought against the twin foes of discrimination and exploitation. Her father, attorney Mark Satter, played a key early role in the long fight for justice.

The virulent (and often violent) racism of the 1940's-1950's keeping black families out of white neighborhoods slowly transformed by the 1960's-1970's into a now familiar set of conditions that are not explicitly racist, but perpetuate inequalities along racial lines. This is an effective case study in "structural racism," sometimes described (either seriously or derisively) as "racism without racists." The development is not hard to follow.

Once markets are distorted by racial bias, public and private institutions set policies that both reflect those distortions and amplify them. This provides opportunities for market actors to exploit those who lack choice and information. The political and legal systems tend to protect and enable the wealthy and socially connected "speculators."

Well-intentioned investors operate in the same space, struggling to provide decent housing at fair prices. But this complicates the picture only a little. The superficial similarity makes it easy for cheats and scammers to rationalize their actions, but their targeted, grossly unethical, and often illegal behavior belies their claims of innocence and "color blindness." They may not have been motivated by racial hatred or fear, but they don't care that their greed and neglect destroy lives, and most are never held accountable.

As I read the last chapter on the federal civil rights trials, I thought "wow, this sounds just like the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2010." Sure enough, Satter drew that connection in her conclusion. We've made progress from the days of firebombing families out of neighborhoods, but we've got a long way to go.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, eye-opening, heart-rending, suspense-inducing, and rage-fomenting book about race relations in Chicago in the 50's thru the 70's, centered on ghetto real estate. It sounds like a boring subject - it is anything but.

I challenge you to allow your notions of race relations in America to be challenged. Pick up this book:

- if you think that the free market will automatically eliminate racist business practices on its own
- if you think that the solution to race relations issues is to elect Democrats/liberals/progressives
- if you think that community racism is something that looks like the KKK, Bull Connor, and lynchings, and since your community didn't have those, no one is meaningfully racist
- if you the Southerners are more racist than Northerners
- if you think the words "structural racism" or "institutional racism" are meaningless, or just code words for "playing the race card"
- if you think you've never seen the negative effects of racism
- if you think electing leaders of a certain skin tone makes a difference
- if you think the main problem with poor urban black culture is failure to take responsibility for their own actions
- if you think government workers or elected officials or judges are more virtuous than business leaders
-If you think that there is a quick fix of any kind or a guaranteed solution to the problem of inner city poverty
-if you think only whites can be racists

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extremely well written account of the institutional segregation of black americans from affordable housing and credit. This story chronicles practices in Chicago and clearly shows how those practices influenced the entire nation. I grew up in the West where institutional segregation and racial bias were much more limited. Also, I grew up after the Civil Rights Movement when many overt practices had been outlawed. Because of this, I had little knowledge of the the personal and societal effects of such practices. Reading this book helped me understand how the practices of personal and institutional bias of the last century contributed to many social and economic problems faced by all americans today. I now have a better understanding of some of the history and influences affecting current race relations. I hope that more americans read this to deepen their understanding of the black and minority experience in this country.

This author is an excellent historian and writer. I found this book to be very clear eyed and balanced in it's approach. She does and excellent job of breaking down a complex subject into a highly readable narrative. This book seems thoroughly researched and documented.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Satter does a great job of combining her family's history and the history of yet another serious embarrassment (for white people) in recent American (Northern) history: contract selling of homes to African Americans in black and mixed areas of Chicago at a time of serious housing shortage. Starting with federal laws and the Federal Housing Administration’s and Veterans’ Administration’s failure to allow mortgages to African Americans in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and continuing with the corruption of Chicago and Cook County, the activities of slumlords, and the open racism of white communities in Chicago (rioting to keep African Americans out of their neighborhoods (but we don’t call it rioting)), through the sub prime mortgage crisis of the Oughts (which did a lot of the same things), this book goes into detail about the shameful actions of white governments, companies, and individuals. The book does, however, tail off a bit toward the end when it gets into the nitty and gritty of a series of lawsuits, but it’s very easy to skim.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chicago has always been shady when it comes to race relations. This book chronicles Chicago's discriminatory history when it comes to black people and housing in the city. There's a huge amount of detail in this book. Just the footnotes are a book by themselves. If you ever wondered why Chicago is so racially segregated, or how Lawndale on the west side and Woodlawn on the south side became predominantly black neighborhoods, read this book.

What surprised me most: how complicit the federal government and the banking industry was in creating the conditions we still see today in Chicago. A key example of institutionalized racism.

The book also underscores something that really made me sad: how easy it was (and probably still is) to scare white people away from a neighborhood with just the IDEA that black people MIGHT be moving in.

[Torie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal read. A great combination of well-written, moving family narrative and devastating historical context. It's also easily the most accessible account of the credit scams that plagued mid-century African-Americans, from contract buyers to wage garnishments to redlining. I especially appreciated the nuanced and realistic portrait of urban slums/ghettoization, their creation, and the ambiguous benefit of their demise.

I have been on a streak of reading non-fiction that I feel is enormously important: books that highlight moments in history that should not be forgotten because their subjects have appeared again in our own time. This is one of them.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic history. This book is about contract selling in Chicago in the 1950s-1970s. It's coming back so best understand how it worked and how to fight it. It's important to understand the exploitation, but also the effects and how to fight it.

[Jocelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommend, even for those with no connection to Chicago, and especially for those who believe institutional racism is just a concept made up by academics in recent years. I like that the author never oversimplifies and that she allows for mixed feelings. Using her own family history, she shows how a system can be so corrupted that goodness has few outlets.

I did dock a star because I found the last few chapters so dry I kept forgetting to pick it back up. But I inhaled the first half, which was excellent. The chapter about MLK’s work in Chicago especially. That one’s worth reading even on its own.

[Emile Sissac · Rating 2 out of 5]

One would have to actually live within the Lawndale or Woodlawn communities of Chicago in order to fully comprehend the subject matter of this book. To be honest, it continually disturbed me while reading "Family Properties" when I reflected back on all of the pains that African-Americans have experienced in trying to attain legitimate home-ownership as done by other ethnic communities.

Today, in 2017, when we discuss the deplorable state of wealth disparities existing between whites and African-Americans, the impact of gentrification in former black neighborhoods, poor health conditions, environmental racism, lack of community economic infrastructures, systemic crime, drug abuse, family break-ups, poor-performing public schools, and other important aspects of any functioning society, you'd only have to read this book to see what African-Americans have had to put up with while being targeted for mistreatment by the hidden forces of government agencies, banks, real estate companies, and willing perpetrators of racism and mistreatment. Is there any question why African-Americans can't pass on generational wealth to their children and grandchildren? If so, "Family Properties" should give any reader at least one huge clue about what it's like being black in America while pursuing the common goals of life, liberty, and happiness.

I'm a product of the Lawndale community, and like many others I grew up with, I had dreams of bettering the community while living there. Sadly, our dreams got deferred, not because we gave up on our hopes, but mainly because of our ignorance of how institutional racism really works. Chicago has always been a very racially-segregated city; it doesn't take one very long to realize this while growing up there. Sadly, the same socioeconomic and political dynamics of Chicago-style racism still exists today. But even in such civic environments, there still are those of us who believe we can make a way out of no way, and do the best we can with the resources at hand.

There's a lot of valuable information within Family Properties that can be used in the future of race relations in this country, especially in the areas of long term effects from the practices of targeted mistreatment against people based on skin color, ethnicity, and class. When you reflect upon all of the immeasurable things that African-Americans have contributed in making the United States the most powerful nation on the face of the Planet to date, the ultimate question that should be asked is why have we been treated this way?

I would highly recommend "Family Properties" as a good read for anyone who's serious about ending mistreatment, exploitation, and racism directed specifically against African-Americans in obtaining the rightful roles as homeowners.

[Joslyn Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's scary that a lot of the racist, ugly policies features in this tome were still on the books only 30 or so years ago. Chicago used to be the model other states followed in terms of launcing and maintaining segregation and racially polarized neighborhoods. (I shouldn't have beed suprised)You can still see the lingering affects today in the real estate/ mortgage game.

[David Cooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm rounding up because of the impressive level of detail in this book. I can't say it's what I expected out of it, though, and I did have a few qualms.

While real estate plays a critical role in this book, this is not a broadly sweeping narrative about race and real estate. I did not realize that, or I might not have picked this one up, honestly. Instead, this is a book about the ghettoization of Chicago, the role that politics and banking played in it, and the use of the law and community organization to try to fight back, mostly as it pertains to one particular neighborhood (Lawndale) and mostly centered on one issue (real estate).

The first half of the book is focused on Beryl Satter's father, a lawyer who it seems fought substantially around housing issues for Black people. It manages to tell a story of a transitional neighborhood and introduces the exploitation of contract selling (well, this is first covered in the intro but fleshed out in detail later). But by focusing so much on her father, it gives the story a personal feel that is at times frustrating (because it is so narrow, and obviously biased even though the author does an admirable job at distancing herself) but also lays clear the extremely detailed approach taken in the book, to focus on every little minutiae by which this one neighborhood's fate is determined. It tells of a number of specific cases meant to capture the way in which this one lawyer tried to aid the community in pushing back on the exploitation enabled by Chicago's dual housing market, from which the powers that be benefitted tremendously.

The second half of the book largely leaves the family angle behind, which I think is good because it can then focus on a more clear arc, this time around the community finding its way to push back, primarily through two different attempts at power building, the first from MLK's visit to Chicago (and for which the author's view is rather damning) and the second around intervention from the Catholic Church that eventually leads to the Contract Buyers League and important legal challenges.

If you are looking for a book to tell a broader story of race and real estate, something like the Color of Law does a much, much better job. But if you are looking for a more "boots on the ground" experience of life in a transitional neighborhood and the challenges faced by the Black community, as well as the systemic way in which Whites profited from and then later denied justice to the Black community, I think this is a very interesting book. Just go in with eyes open that it is a dense, microscopic deep dive into one community's experience.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m surprised I ended up enjoying the book as much as I did.

First of all, the opening chapters were filled with fairly typical stories about racist white bankers destroying black ghetto communities. Also, the fact that the story revolved around the author’s father, Mark Satter, who vigorously prosecuted these brokers and other white “slumlords” in the 1950s and 60s, seemed to guarantee that the author would provide a fairly one-sided, legalistic view of ghetto problems.

But even though some of Satter’s opinions made me want to throw the book across the room, overall this is a fascinating look at a few of the lesser battles in the 1950s and 60s struggle for civil rights in the North, one that dives into the real nitty-gritty of legal proceedings and political haggling of civil rights activists and their opponents. So despite Satter’s simplistic conclusion that basically condemns a small group of overly greedy slumlords for destroying inner city Chicago, in the end the book shows the unbelievable complexity of racial politics in the city.

For instance, a 1956 housing code change forced the removal of all “crash panel fire doors” in Chicago apartment houses. These panel doors allowed apartment owners to further subdivide already crowded tenement buildings, thus increasing both urban density and their profit margins. Although the code change was encouraged by many good government activists, including the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council (the MHPC - which tried to form a racially-integrated Hyde Park neighborhood using urban renewal funds), it also drastically reduced real estate options and raised prices for poor black renters. Still, the group that formed in 1960 to protest the code change, the Independent Property Owners Association (IPOA), was denounced by attorney Mark Satter and others as a front for racist slumlords. To further complicate matters, his own law partner went on to unsuccessfully challenge the code in court as an attorney for the IPOA, believing strongly that the law was destructive for everybody involved. While the newspapers that supported the new code often played up the image of heartless landowners gouging poor blacks living in tiny apartments, including some who died in horrible and preventable house fires, the black Chicago Defender had pointed out earlier that many of these landowners were also black, and they were often losing money on their own meager real estate investment. Even though at a distance that era's racial politics seem so much more clear cut than today's, it was still often hard to know who was on what side of any particular “racial” issue in the city of that era. The author's fascinating take on Martin Luther King's unsuccessful Chicago campaign in 1966, shows how the simple moral slogans of Southern civil rights failed when confronted by the North's dilemmas.

The root of most of this Northern racial trouble, according to both Mark and Beryl Satter, was the “contract sellers” who exploited blacks who couldn’t receive mortgages by providing them with high-interest, high down-payment “contract” loans. Yet Satter provides plenty of evidence that this story is not as clear-cut as she would like, for instance the case of Mrs. Rosen in Lawndale. Mrs. Rosen was a committed anti-racist Jew who sold her home through an ex-Communist party real estate broker to a black family after receiving no acceptable offers from whites. Despite some locals attacking her for selling to blacks, she reminded them of the Jews' own struggle with discrimination, and declared she had a right to sell to anyone. Yet, surprisingly for Satter, Mrs. Rosen sold her house using the same kind of high down-payment, contract loan which was supposedly the sole province of racist contract sellers. It seems clear from this and many other cases in the book that racism alone couldn’t have caused the systematic higher prices for black homebuyers, since these artificially higher prices would have attracted more "non-racist" (or simply undercutting) sellers who would have bid down prices. Satter never explains how if gouging ghetto communities were so incredibly lucrative, more people didn’t get involved in investing there. She in fact finds that real estate investors lost millions in ghetto properties and many were ruined by them entirely. She of course, using now questioned research from Kenneth Jackson, also blames HOLC and the FHA for preventing mortgage loans in black areas, but in her telling the contract sellers and slumlords are the true villains. Perhaps most damning for the author’s theory, Mark Satter himself bought some apartment houses in the 1950s that rapidly decayed as his Lawndale neighborhood “transitioned” from white to black, and he was even confronted and branded on a local television program as a typical Chicago slumlord while he was suing these very same for destroying the neighborhood. Far from being a profit bonanza, these houses almost bankrupt him and his family. Satter, however, does not then extrapolate this experience to other “slumlords.” The real problem in the book didn’t seem to be evil real estate brokers or racist banks, it was evidently the racist working-class whites who often violently resisted opening up their communities to black buyers (Satter provides plenty of evidence for this) and who thus forced blacks into crowded, overly expensive homes in concentrated ghettos. But a racist lower-middle class home-owning Slovak immigrant makes a less compelling villain for a liberal professor than shady banks and brokers.

The second half of the book deals with a massive class-action lawsuit against “price gougers” who made high profits by building or selling homes at high prices in black communities. This part of the book is the most fascinating as well as the most horrifying. Satter seems to genuinely believe that these lawsuits, if successful, would have broken the back of the contract sellers and achieved a semi-liberation of black Chicago from their oppressive overlords. My opinion is that any lawsuit that sued builders (many of whom seemed to be committed anti-racists, and who built homes in black communities despite economic and social pressures to avoid them) simply for making profits, would almost assure that no new building would take place in those ghettos for year to come. The threat of similar civil rights lawsuits almost certainly discouraged investments in these already damaged communities. If these lawsuits had won, as Satter and the advocates had hoped, God only knows if anybody would have invested in black communities for generations, buffeted by the legitimate fear that any profits they made would be branded as a sign of “racism.” It actually made me shiver to contemplate how close these suits came to success, and how a few federal judges could have further wrecked countless black communities across the country.

Overall, the book can be thoroughly enjoyed without indulging in the author’s conclusions and policy prescriptions, and it should be read by anybody interested in how the civil rights movement stalled amongst the still implacable problems in the urban North.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Satter, framing the story partly as a biography of her civil rights attorney father, whom died young, argued that the creation of Chicago’s black ghetto was largely because of discriminatory housing practices by both institutions and profiteers. Because banks would not give mortgages to newly arriving black residents, and the Federal government’s FDIC created redlined maps, which private entities used to decide where to invest. If a block contained a single black resident, that block would get no funds.
At the heart of Satter’s argument is that because of the lack of available housing, the vulnerability of newly arriving black residents seeking a better life, housing profiteers took advantage by trying to get white residents to move by “block busting”. Because banks would not give mortgages to black residents, the profiteers sold contracts, by which if a resident did not own the property and if they missed a single payment over the course of the contract, they were evicted, and the property resold at significant markups to the next black resident. Evictions were very common, and to meet the demands, owners often subdivided the properties, which resulted in overcrowding. As properties became more and more worthless because of the instability, properties were torched by arson in order to collect insurance. At the same time, Catholic working class whites drove out black residents through violent riots. White upper middle class doctors and lawyers invested in housing to make money, sucking out income from black residents.
The second part of the story was the attempts to fight back. After the symbolic and real failures to organize against discriminatory housing by MLK and Saul Alinsky, on separate occasions, the Contract Buyers of Lawndale launched a series of lawsuits which had mixed results, sometimes thrown out by a rigged system. But, they did begin reversing the contract system and eventually discriminatory housing practices were outlawed, though generational damage had already been done.

Key Themes and Concepts
-The “culture of poverty” is largely untrue, instead shaped by historical forces and recent discrimination, resulting in high segregation.

-The ability to make profits at the cost of migrants drove the creation of Northern ghettos.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book had me in turns angry, sad, uproariously happy, frustrated, disappointed, and teary-eyed (in good and bad ways)... LOVED this book, LOVED it... i was pulled in from the outset, as the author hinted at some mystery about her father connection to urban housing... then it just went full-on into the racist housing practices in Chicago in the years following WWI... amazing how unbelievably racist people could be but hide behind "making money" or "working with the system in place"as their defense... they saw no reason to care laws were racist in their intent if not their wording, they just used them to try masking their racism and hate to ruin the lives of black people trying to make lives for themselves in Chicago... what i loved about the book are the amazing people, including the author's father, who fought the racist system at every turn to make things right... how White America denies its overt racist past and its institutionalized racist present is beyond any rational explanation... this book covers so many aspects of the obviously racist housing and financial practices that supported it, and the racist politicians and businesspeople and judges and religious leaders, with amazing flair and a fabulous sense of drama... but it never let's you forget this is real life, with real people, fighting real wrongs against a system loaded against it and in denial of its racist operations and goals... so many things to love about this book i can't get to them all without spoiling the fun... serious stuff, very much so... read this and understand black people have never had a level playing field in Chicago, or anywhere else in the US, ever... but don't think just because it is old news, it is over and fixed... redlining still happens, in many aspects of black people's lives, even though it is 100% illegal... you see, the same "i'm not a racist i'm just operating in the system" attitude persists today... until America admits its racist beginnings and continuing attempts to marginalize black people as a race nothing much will change... reparations sound silly to some, but if you read Ta-Nehisi Coates' article about it, you may change your mind... if not, well you're probably pretty racist then...

[Kasey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I contemplated giving it two stars, the book wasn't exactly what I thought it would be. Having said that, the substance of the book and what it's actually about is hard to underrate. A lot of it (particularly early on) is court cases regarding real estate disputes. I feel like this contributed to a slow start for the book, I would have preferred it been summarized better. Nevertheless, this read does an stellar job of dismissing commonly held (often racially prejudice) beliefs about welfare and the "culture of poverty" crap. Real estate business and contract sellers would use predatory practices to turn massive sized profits (up to 75%). Spreading fear among whites about integration and declining property value, this would often result in the buying properties and reselling them well above market value to blacks (a process called "blockbusting"). Whats worse is the fact blacks were largely denied a fair and equal access to credit.

Everything from the redlining of mortgages on property to "credit racketeering" on smaller transactions in the form of wage garnishment. The former would force black families into exploitative contract sells and the latter would allow creditors to collect a portion of their paychecks. What's worse is, many of people that fell victim to the credit merchants would often lose their jobs in the process, simply because employers found it to be a hassle to divide up their paychecks. If this happened enough, it would become difficult for them to find work elsewhere. As this book lays out in clear detail, urban poverty was most certainly not a product of inferior value systems, but rather a systemic and multi-faceted assault by way of white hostility upheld by the courts refusal to make any substantive changes to ameliorate the problems.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute, mandatory, this-is-how-we-got-into-this-nightmare reading.

Here we are.

Beryl Satter has the answers in her father's scrapbooks. He was a Jewish lawyer from Lawndale, a Chicago neighborhood that was always more working class than was remembered when white people reminisced about the before-redlining times. Mr. Satter was a progressive who realized early what was happening in Black neighborhoods. He was operating in the box of history and he couldn't see US housing policy as the decisions were being made, but he was approached by several Black families who were being exploited by their contract sellers: charged additional fees or otherwise forced out if they were making too many payments on time, or evicted if they missed a month. Satter did his best to represent his clients, charging them a flat fee of $50 because they were all in desperate circumstances already, and writing articles in the Black press and anywhere else that would publish warnings about the pitfalls of buying on contract and the system that rewarded the sellers.

(Michelle Obama talks in Becoming about how her family stayed middle class by avoiding home buying. In America!)

Beryl Satter's father fought against contract selling and retail store wage garnishing, which was a legal and predatory thing, until his health broke and he died of a heart attack at 49, leaving his elementary school daughter to grow up and explain what the hell was happening.

Red lining, of course.

So African-Americans were shut out of the conventional mortgage system. And most neighborhoods. So they had to live in the few neighborhoods they were allowed. And with no mortgages available, they had to buy from white contract sellers who could get mortgages, huge mortgages at well above the value of the property, which allowed them to buy more homes (block-busting!) to sell to more Black families, who paid well above what they would have paid with a conventional, thirty year, fixed rate mortgage.

The Black families struggled to pay the jacked up contract sales prices, so they worked two jobs, took in renters, neglected home maintenance, had to leave their kids unsupervised while they worked, and everything else that makes a white person sniff at the Black family and write the Moynihan Report. And if they missed one payment, the seller would take back the contract. This was all generating buckets of money for white collar investors.

One and a half Nixon presidencies later and a worse US housing policy later, the book culminates with an organized group of neighbors fighting a lawsuit for the right to pay a sensible amount of money on their homes, which they lost in a jury trial, with the head juror saying in an interview after that this was a step in "reversing all the Brown vs. Board of Education nonsense."

So, here we are, reading this book.

The afterword has a thread of hope and a rumination on the 2008 housing crisis, because we never fix anything.

Read this book!

[Erik Strand · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading for, like, everyone. A phenomenally comprehensive (and infuriating) exploration of racial housing exploitation in Chicago.

The first section, focused mainly on the author's father, is biographical perhaps at the expense of the underlying history. The second section, however, is some of the best I've read. Satter's look into MLK's failed Chicago Freedom Movement, the misleading 'culture of poverty' theory, and community and legal battles over contract selling in Chicago are well-researched and absolutely gripping.

Must read for anyone who hopes to understand Chicago's segregation and dark history of exploitation of its Black residents. Unfortunately, too much of it remains relevant and unresolved. 5/5

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mix of family memoir and straight history, Family Properties is a fascinating and troubling accounting of how racism, redlining, and other financial shenanigans victimized African American homebuyers in Chicago. Satter uses an interesting structure, with part 1 focusing on her father, a lawyer (and landlord), who represented low-income homebuyers who had been victimized by shady contract sales, and part 2 really focusing on the community-based efforts to fight the system. Along the way, Satter provides rich insights into Chicago politics and the economics of housing and discrimination, finally finding parallels with the more recent subprime mortgage scandals. I definitely recommend this book.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of details about Chicago real estate race bias in the 1950s through the 1970s. The author is a daughter of one of the prominent anti-bias attorneys of the time.

This book serves as a good introduction into the racial segregation story of Chicago during that time. The author's relation to the story is worth bearing in mind, especially when she blatantly leaps to lopsided poorly explained conclusions not everyone would agree with.

One other qualm is the book could have used some editing help so that the author doesn't try to fit too much into a single chapter, especially in the latter half. She wants to tell the full story but it sometimes reads as if you're being given individual important facts all jumbled together.

[Vannessa Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Family Properties tells the story of how American Descendants of Slaves were refused mortgages by financial institutions.

Family Properties tells the story of how American Descendants of Slaves were only allowed “contract” loans where if they missed a single payment they were evicted.

Family Properties tells the story of the History of the Lawndale community and how it began as a German/Irish community that turned into a heavily Jewish community.

In Family Properties we learn about Monsignor John Egan Campaign for Payday Laws Reform.

Family Properties was well written and appeared to be well researched.

Family Properties was an informative read.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was interested in this book, because I grew up in Chicago in the 50s and 60s. My Chicago background meant that this story resonated much more than a book about another locale. Ms. Satter is a historian and provides copious annotations. I saw the book as divided into three parts: the real estate exploiters who were fought by her father, the residential segregation that existed during the rise of the civil rights movement (including a stay in Chicago by MLK), and the federal law suits that attempted to correct the problem. I thought the book picked up momentum as the story ensued. In addition, there were a number of local figures that I enjoyed learning more about.