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

Beryl Satter (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 17, 2009 | ISBN-10: 080507676X | ISBN-13: 978-0805076769 | Edition: First Edition

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 country: 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 oppression: 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.

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the early 1950s, Mark Satter opened his law practice in the Chicago suburb of Lawndale, but his life's work really began in 1957, the day a black couple, Albert and Sallie Bolton, walked through his doors needing a stay on an eviction from a home they had just purchased. Satter uncovered a citywide scheme, in which landlords sold African-Americans overpriced homes, keeping the titles until black homeowners paid them off, while charging excessive interest rates to insure they never could. Called contract selling, the practice cost thousands of migrating blacks their livelihoods. Mark Satter died of a heart condition eight years after the Boltons crossed his threshold, but nearly 50 years later, his daughter, Beryl, a history professor at Rutgers, picked up where he left off. Setting out to prove that the decline of black neighborhoods into slums had nothing to do with the absence of African-American resources and everything to do with subjugation and greed, Satter draws on her father's records to piece together a thoughtful and very personal account of the exploitation that kept blacks segregated and impoverished. (Mar.)
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Review

"Beryl Satter's Family Properties is really an incredible book. It is, by far, the best book I've ever read on the relationship between blacks and Jews. That's because it hones in on the relationship between one specific black community and one specific Jewish community and thus revels in the particular humanity of all its actors. In going small, it ultimately goes big."
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

“This is rich material… Satter balances personal stories, including moments of great bravery, with painstaking legal and historical research. Family Properties is transfixing from the first sentence. The pleasures here are deep and resonate ones… an instant classic.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

 

“Satter’s painstaking thorough portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is 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.”
—David Garrow, The Washington Post

 

“Beryl Satter has taken the hard road to glory in her study of race and housing discrimination in Chicago during the 1950s and ‘60s. Yet somehow she has managed to stay on course, using her considerable investigative skills and unwavering sense of fairness to write a revealing and instructive book… A cautionary tale of government complicity, Family Properties follows the social historian’s dictum of “asking big questions in small places.” It reminds us that history and memory are essential tools for anyone pondering our current predicament.”
—The New York Times Book Review

 

“This sweeping chronicle of greed and racism combines a noble and tragic family history with a painful account of big city segregation and courageous acts of community resistance. In riveting stories and thoughtful analysis, Satter powerfully discloses how manipulation and abuse shattered lives and deepened urban inequality.”
—Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

 

“Beryl Satter brings Chicago’s West Side to life in this vivid history of a neighborhood fighting for survival. She gives the urban crisis a human face in unforgettable portraits of the slumlords and the activists and lawyers (including her father) who battled valiantly against them.”
—Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North

 

“This history of a place called Lawndale, on the west side of Chicago, is an archetypal American story of struggle and rise, race and divisiveness, justice denied and then justice achieved. Clyde Ross, Ruth Wells, Mark J. Satter, Monsignor Egan, Jack Macnamara, and the others—these are American heroes. I was privileged to be briefly involved, and I'm so glad to see Family Properties, after all these years, that I could hoot with joy, and then weep.”
—David Quammen, author of Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“This is how the story of urban America after the Second World War ought to be written, with gritty realism and no illusions. Here is urban history as a drama of moral conflict and religious passion. Family Properties is a searing and deeply moving work, by a loving daughter and a great historian.”
—Robert Orsi, Professor of Religion and History, Northwestern University

 

“One of the most contentious issues of twentieth century America was the transformation of middle-class white neighborhoods into African-American slums. The cast of characters is familiar—unscrupulous realtors, heartless slumlords, promiscuous welfare mothers, rapacious drug dealers, corrupt politicians, discriminatory savings and loan associations, and a racist government. But Beryl Satter tells a different story, a nuanced story, and a personal story in this compelling re-examination of a phenomenon everyone knows about and no one understands. Family Properties will change the way you think about history and about causation.”
—Kenneth T. Jackson, Barzun Professor of History, Columbia University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; First Edition edition (March 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080507676X
• ISBN-13: 978-0805076769
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #579,945 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An instant classic March 19, 2009

By Antero Pietila

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
This is one terrific book -- focused, hard-hitting and extremely readable. I will not go into details; a growing number of glowing reviews from the New York Times,the Washington Post and others take care of that. In brief, Satter has written an instant classic about exloitative contract sales to blacks that were common in many cities from World War II to the late 1960s. This is a must read for anyone wanting to understand why America's big cities turned out the way they did.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Timely and Revealing Book March 22, 2009

By Herbert L Calhoun

Format:Hardcover

A very timely and revealing book in light of continued patterns of racially segregated urban housing and discriminatory lending practices; as well as in light of President Obama's community work in Chicago's lower class neighborhoods, Sudhir Venkatesh's three books about the Robert Taylor Housing Projects, and the recent Mortgage Melt-down, to name just a few.

This author has put her finger on the pulse of America's ugly under current and her pen where her mouth is. Mixing family history with sociological facts, Ms. Satter reconstructs the shameful framework of a part of America's racist past that haunts us even as it continues to bear devastating negative fruit for mostly black urban communities across the land, even today.

The overriding fear after reading this book is that this experiment in the most hidden, persistent and pernicious of systemic racism has undoubtedly been that it has been responsible for laying the foundation for a generation of poverty and social misery whose pattern, like an evil template has been repeated throughout the country in almost every major metropolitan area of the U.S.

Arguably, it has been this pernicious pattern that in large measure has been responsible for the hole that other Americans seem to think the black working and underclass has dug all on its own, solely as a result of its own decadent and mal-adaptive behavior.

While the jury still remains out on the final details of the particular shape of America's black social meltdown and the full genesis of its overall pathology, Ms. Satter's book makes a big dent in undermining the logic of that conventional wisdom and makes it unmistakably clear that past racism in U.S. housing policy in the North, played an important if not a decisive role in creating and sustaining the current shameful and embarrassing race-based social order and thus in creating and sustaining the current racist mess our nation continues to find itself in today even with a black President.

Here, with great clarity, wit, with a Sociologist bent, and a profound sense of seriousness, the author shows how redlining, contract selling, lack of access to equitable credit, not only impoverished hardworking and highly motivated blacks, many of them, veterans back from the German front, but these practices also greatly enriched those who benefitted from them and who helped enforce the racist rules and laws. Not surprisingly, as is still the case, among the major culprits was to be found the U.S. Government itself. Just as Fannie Mae,Freddie Mac, and other quasi governmental agencies are implicated today, so too was FHA and other federal housing agencies implicated at the creation of the racist housing mess.

Unfortunately, her personal family tragedy gets played out writ large: Just as her father had no viable recourses to redressing the inequities and unfairness, so too remains the case for a whole generation of black Americans both in the last generation and to a lesser extent, even today -- as is witnessed in the aftermath of the current "Mortgage Ponzi bust-out."

Her research beautifully compliments the ethnographic work of Sudhir Venkatesh and comes to essentially the same conclusions. It also dramatically demonstrates why President Obama's community organizing work in Chicago of a decade ago was destined to fail. A great read.

Five Stars

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars How the slums evolved May 23, 2009

By Stephen L. Slavin

Format:Hardcover

Blacks have been screwed by whites for four centuries, so what can we learn from still another book -- this one focusing on housing and economic discrimination half a century ago? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Beryl Satter, a Rutgers University historial, has written an almost epic work that explains just how systematically black familes were exploited in the decades after the Second World War. Central to her story is the role played by white contract sellers, who provided black families with overpriced rundown houses that they could not afford. As soon as they missed a payment, the contract seller, who held title to the house, would evict the family and resell it to another black family.
Although this took place in Chicago, probably the most segregated city in the country, this practice took place throughout the nation. The Federal Housing Administration had redlined neighborhoods where even just a few blacks lived, making very hard for anyone to get a mortgage. This placed black families entirely at the mercy of the contract sellers, who, in effect, robbed these families of their savings.
Satter has meticulously researched her subject, but managed to write an eminently readable books. If you are curious about how the big city slums evolved during the post-war decades, this is the book for you.