Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America

Grossly inequitable taxation policies have led to Detroit’s foreclosure crisis, according to this meticulous study. Property law scholar Atuahene (We Want What’s Ours) draws on decades’ worth of property records and over 200 interviews with homeowners and real estate investors to prove there has been systemic overtaxation of Black homeowners in the hundreds of millions of dollars when compared to white homeowners (“Of the 63,000 Detroit homes with delinquent tax debt in 2019, the City overtaxed about 90 percent of them,” ). She shows that the systemic origins of this imbalance are not only an opaque property tax system that keeps homeowners from understanding why they are being taxed, but overtaxed Black homeowners’ lack of access to agencies that could advise them on their options for appeal (unlike white homeowners, who Atuahene depicts as plied with such advice). Atuahene suggests that such obstacles are baked into the system, in order to entrap the uninformed and, in Atuahene’s astute perspective, to cause an “enormous transfer of wealth from homeowners in this majority Black city to government coffers.” Coupling her statistical analysis with profiles of two families—one African American, the other Italian—since their arrival in Detroit in the early 1900s, Atuahene evocatively demonstrates how inequitable taxation contributed, along with redlining and other racist policies, to the families’ divergent paths. It’s a vital addition to the literature on housing inequality in America. (Jan.)