The Skimmer

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black Urban America By Beryl Satter Metropolitan Books; 495 pages

For African Americans in 1950s Chicago, buying a house was nearly impossible. Federal mortgage insurance didn’t cover homes in integrated neighborhoods, making getting a loan difficult; in black neighborhoods, predatory sellers jacked up prices and forced buyers to pay outrageous monthly fees or face eviction. The resulting financial strains only compounded black Chicagoans’ housing problems and drove their neighborhoods into decline. Satter, a history professor at Rutgers University, illustrates her lucid analysis of race and class on Chicago’s West Side with the experiences of her father, a white lawyer and landlord who crusaded against the city’s discriminatory policies and fought those who exploited black homeowners. But the story doesn’t end with his premature death in 1965, at 49. By the late 1960s, an increasingly informed and outraged community was fighting back on its own. The ultimate result was the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which required banks to document their loans and outlawed discriminatory practices.

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