Book Review: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

If simplified, twentieth-century United States housing policy could be boiled down to two intersecting principles: the federal government’s facilitation of homeownership through Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans, and the systematic exclusion of people of color, particularly of African Americans, from accessing such programs. Housing and community development scholars are all too familiar with how federal policies and the real estate industry have worked together to create segregated cities and suburbs. In the years following white flight, however, African American homeownership in urban neighborhoods is seldom discussed. In Race for Profit, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes an unfamiliar period of federal housing policy that occurred under familiar terms. The more familiar story is how poor African American families with extremely limited access to housing options were exploited via the private ecosystem of lenders, real estate agents, and property owners that sustained the federal program. What is novel about Taylor’s account are the details of the short-lived Section 235 program, which facilitated homeownership loans to poor and working-class individuals, many of whom were Black women. The HUD Act of 1968 included a provision that created the Section 235 program, which provided subsidies directly to private lenders so that lower-income home buyers could in turn access credit and mortgage interest rates that were as low as 1 percent. Just as municipalities phased out redlining and created lending opportunities in urban neighborhoods, the HUD Act of 1968 opened up FHA loans to a class of buyers who were previously excluded from homeownership. To theorize what took place under the Section 235 and similar programs, Taylor uses the concise and compelling term predatory inclusion, which she describes as granting African Americans access to publicly subsidized financial services while also ignoring how structural racism that was deeply embedded in the housing market would serve to further disadvantage Black homeowners. As Taylor puts it, “where white housing was seen as an asset developed through inclusion and the accruable possibilities of its surrounding property, Black housing was marked by its distress and isolation, where value was extracted, not imbued” (p. 11). The concept of predatory inclusion is best encapsulated in Taylor’s vivid descriptions of what families endured as they tried to gain access to the American Dream. Under Section 235, no contact with HUD or other government officials was required, and potential homeowners often exclusively worked with private mortgage lenders and real estate agents. Taylor details how many were unwittingly steered into homeownership, often in cases where prices were artificially inflated and properties were in a state of deep disrepair. She recounts the story of the mother of nine in Paterson, NJ, who bought a home with a faulty plumbing system for $12,500 after it was sold to a broker earlier that same day for $9,000. Or the single mother in Philadelphia who was quickly coerced into purchasing a home with an FHA-backed loan, only to 1006494 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841211006494City & CommunityBook Reviews book-review2021