Ezra's Bookshelf

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor · 364 pages · ~6.5 hrs

EconomicsRace & Identity

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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor chronicles how housing policies of the 1960s and 1970s shifted from excluding African Americans outright to including them in ways designed to fail. Taylor, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton, examines how the Federal Housing Administration, which had previously refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods, began promoting homeownership in those same areas through programs that enriched the real estate industry while trapping Black families--especially Black women--in predatory arrangements. The book focuses on the period following the 1968 Fair Housing Act, showing how real estate agents, mortgage bankers, and speculators exploited government guarantees to sell overpriced, poorly maintained homes to buyers who had no other options and little protection. Taylor traces how this 'predatory inclusion' produced the same outcomes as the exclusion it replaced: wealth extraction from Black communities, deteriorating housing stock, and reinforced segregation. She argues that the turn to homeownership as racial progress obscured how the terms of inclusion determined whether it would build wealth or destroy it. The book connects 1970s housing policy to the 2008 foreclosure crisis that devastated Black homeowners, showing continuity in how American capitalism has incorporated racial inequality into profit-making schemes.

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