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I posted the following originally on the Baltimore board but it seems the topic deserves nationwide attention:
If you read the New York Times on Thursday and will read the Book Review on Sunday, you will find nothing but praise for Beryl Satter's new book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. Every bit is deserved.
Although the strong and beautifully written book is about Chicago, it applies to Baltimore as well. What was known in Chicago as contract buying was known in Baltimore in land installment contracts. Up to about 1970, an estimated 80 percent of Baltimore blacks bought houses under that exploitative rent-to-buy arrangement because no banks or mortgage companies lent their money. The Baltimore epitome of this phenomenon was Morris Goldseker, the city's biggest landlord who also had a name convenient for chanting at protest rallies. Goldseeker, Goldsucker.
Anyone pondering Baltimore's urban evolution can find wonderful books about other cities. One basic work is the Columbia University professor Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States Then there is Nick Lehmann's Promised Land about the Great Black Migration, again focused on Chicago. The UMBC professor Edward Orser's Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story describes racial change in that West Baltimore neighborhood.
There are plenty of others, of course. Many are about Chicago; another classic is about how Harlem in New York changed from an upper-class neighborhood of the American born first to a borough dominated by freshly arrived European immigrants and then became dominated by blacks and Puerto Ricans.
A really interesting read is Forrest R. White's "Pride and Prejudice: School Desegregation and Urban Renewal in Norfolk, 1950-1959."
This book describes a southern, segregated city which enjoyed prosperity and growth after WW2. The growth crowded the city and pushed the boundaries of white/black neighborhoods. Parts of the city became "gray." As the school desegregation crisis mounted in the 1950s, these gray areas became problematic, because the only way segregationists could legally keep black students out of white schools was to be sure that black students had a black school nearby. If a white school were closer to them, they would have to be allowed to attend that closer school. So Norfolk targeted its "urban renewal" projects in the 1950s at the "gray" neighborhoods, to firm up the residential segregation. Norfolk's urban renewal projects were among the first and largest in the nation. Endless acres of some of the city's urban neighborhoods were bulldozed, all for the sake of keeping schools segregated. Literal "no mans land" areas separated black neighborhoods and black schools from white neighborhoods and schools. And by 1959, when Norfolk was directly ordered to desegregate, the city closed its schools for one year. The city wore the scars of its self destruction for decades. Many areas around downtown were vacant until only recently.
I posted the following originally on the Baltimore board but it seems the topic deserves nationwide attention:
If you read the New York Times on Thursday and will read the Book Review on Sunday, you will find nothing but praise for Beryl Satter's new book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. Every bit is deserved.
Although the strong and beautifully written book is about Chicago, it applies to Baltimore as well. What was known in Chicago as contract buying was known in Baltimore in land installment contracts. Up to about 1970, an estimated 80 percent of Baltimore blacks bought houses under that exploitative rent-to-buy arrangement because no banks or mortgage companies lent their money. The Baltimore epitome of this phenomenon was Morris Goldseker, the city's biggest landlord who also had a name convenient for chanting at protest rallies. Goldseeker, Goldsucker.
Anyone pondering Baltimore's urban evolution can find wonderful books about other cities. One basic work is the Columbia University professor Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States Then there is Nick Lehmann's Promised Land about the Great Black Migration, again focused on Chicago. The UMBC professor Edward Orser's Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story describes racial change in that West Baltimore neighborhood.
There are plenty of others, of course. Many are about Chicago; another classic is about how Harlem in New York changed from an upper-class neighborhood of the American born first to a borough dominated by freshly arrived European immigrants and then became dominated by blacks and Puerto Ricans.
Because I'd really like to see the discussion of "exploitation" with that in mind. Especially the programs that have to teach urban blacks how to pay bills and where to send rent money.
I looked but cannot find the statistics. An insane number of Section 8 vouchers are held by urban blacks in Chicago. I didn't care until the word "exploitation" came up, and I'd to know if the book provides an analysis on how generational welfare amounts to exploitation.
The answer to your question is no. The index lists one reference to Section 8. The reason: Satter describes Chicago's real estate scene before 1969, when the Federal Housing Adminstration unveiled a number of no-downpayment programs that drove contract sellers out of business. The effect of those programs in Baltimore was the introduction of low-income blacks in desegregating neighborhoods The outcome was that the rest of whites ran, but did so the black homeowners who came from a higher social strata.
I really liked "I'm black and the world is out to get me," by Whiney Mcblamerpants.
I might agree with you in certain cases, but definitely not in this one. People of a certain race (guess which!) were definitely screwed in that time period and in that way.
I might agree with you in certain cases, but definitely not in this one. People of a certain race (guess which!) were definitely screwed in that time period and in that way.
And it was not limited to the melanin deficient folks. A good friend told me, that when he was bad, his mama would scold, "Your color is showin'!"
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Thanks
