Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 years of 100 Things. Since it's Black History Month, we'll look at a major issue at the root of our racial wealth gap today. It's the first of several 100 years of 100 Things Black History Month segments we'll be doing this month. Today it's thing number 65, Housing Inequality.

Our guest today is Bernadette Atuahene. She is property rights scholar and professor at USC's Gould School of Law. She also leads the grassroots Coalition for Property Tax Justice and the Black Homes Matter campaign, and joins us today to discuss her new book. She's got a brand-new book, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America. In it, she retells the story of two different families, and we'll invite your personal stories as well to contribute your oral histories here as we do in these segments, two different families in Michigan in this book, one Black, the other Italian, both with roots in sharecropping. Through these personal accounts, we learn how housing policies like zoning ordinances, redlining, and what she calls predatory governance resulted in generational wealth for one family and poverty for the other.

Professor Atuahene, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to WNYC and our 100 Years of 100 Things series.

Professor Atuahene: Brian, thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's begin where the stories of your subjects begin. More than 100 years ago, 160 years ago, after slavery was abolished in the United States, many newly freed enslaved people became sharecroppers, sometimes even on the same land they used to work when they were enslaved. What was this practice and when did it end in this country and how is it relevant to the story you're telling?

Professor Atuahene: Well, Plundered is really the story of two grandfathers, like you said, who were both sharecroppers in their native lands, and both came to Detroit to work at Ford Motor Company's River Rouge factory in the early 1900s. One is called Grandpa Bucci. He's white, and he came from Italy. The sharecropping system there was called Mezzadria, so there was also sharecropping in Italy. The other, Grandpa Brown, was Black and came from North Carolina and was a sharecropper in America. And River Rouge was one of the Ford Motor Company's dirtiest and most dangerous factories. Nevertheless, job helped these two men and their families escape from poverty and enter the middle class.

Although neither grandfather had an easy life, the book goes through how racist policies affected the Black grandfather's ability to pass along wealth to his grandchildren, while the Italian grandfather and his descendants were allowed to thrive. The racist policies I'm talking about include racially restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, urban renewal, predatory mortgage lending, and most recently, inequitable property taxation, which we can talk about more in a minute. I call these racist policies because they're written and unwritten laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity. Racist policies exist regardless of intention. Although Plundered begins with Detroit and the Ford Motor Company, it's not just about Detroit. It's a national story about how racist policies undermine Black homeownership in America.

Brian Lehrer: I think one of the things that's so eye-opening about this book is how many of these there have been over the years imposed by the government. That's why we put you in our 100 Years of 100 Things series with this new book because we can go through some of these. We just talked about the end of slavery, the immediate end of slavery. Now we're going to jump to 1910, 110 years ago, 115 years ago. It's the start of what's known as the Great Migration in which many Black Americans left the American South for cities in the North. What significance does this mass movement hold in the history of Black homeownership? Maybe you want to relate it to a 1922 Michigan Supreme Court case called Parmalee v. Morris that you write about.

Professor Atuahene: What we are dealing with here is-- and Grandpa Brown was part of that Great Migration. He came over, like I said, from North Carolina to Detroit. When he comes to Detroit, the point is he cannot live in certain areas of the city of Detroit because of a racist policy called racially restrictive covenants. These are covenants that are tucked in deeds, and they're all over the country, that say African Americans cannot live in these particular houses. On the West Coast, you have these racially restrictive covenants also extended to Asians.

While Grandpa Bucci didn't have an easy life whatsoever, he never had to face racially restrictive covenants which restricted where he could live within the city of Detroit. Then later on, these racially restrictive covenants prevented Grandpa Brown and those who came to Detroit and all urban areas through the Great Migration from accessing the suburbs where the houses were cheaper, bigger and with better amenities.

After the people from the Great Migration are dealing with racially restrictive covenants, the US government comes and draws a red line around areas where the Black people were sequestered. Now that red line is telling banks and other financial intermediaries, don't invest- these are high-risk investments. Do not invest in these areas. Now these areas are deprived of home improvement loans, mortgages, and so of course, these areas become deteriorated because the federal government through redlining is preventing resources from coming into these areas. After they prevent resources from coming into these areas and the areas are then becoming decrepit, now we have urban renewal which comes on the scene to then tear down these communities because of the blight that redlining caused, but once they tear down the communities, they take the bad and the good. They take the Black businesses, they take the Black cultural institutions along with the deteriorated houses caused by redlining.

Then we have blockbusting, which is when these real estate intermediaries come in and say, the Black people are coming. You have to move. It doesn't matter how white people felt about Black people. Because of redlining, our very presence, in fact, did reduce home values. When white people left, these real estate intermediaries then-- people sold- anytime you sell quickly, you don't get the full price, and they sold at a loss. Then they sold them at inflated prices to Black people.

Although, again, I tell the story in the book about Grandpa Bucci and Grandpa Brown; again, the Italian grandfather did not have an easy life, but he never had to deal with racially restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, urban renewal, et cetera, and all of the people who came up, as you're talking about, through the Great Migration, did.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if anybody out there right now has your own family oral history or a piece of it to add to this conversation, 100 years of property law discrimination with the author of the guest Plundered. Any of these things, racial covenants, redlining, any of these other discriminatory policies in the public or private sector, and how they may have contributed to wealth inequality in this country along racial lines as it has affected your own family. Does anybody have a story? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text.

Let's move on to 1934, 91 years ago. The Federal Housing Administration is founded that year by Congress and at its inception, it began the practice of redlining. How did this come out of Washington, per se? You mention redlining, of course, and a lot of listeners may be marginally familiar with what redlining is. How did it come out of DC?

Professor Atuahene: Well, when you think about redlining, Federal Fair Housing Administration was a big player in redlining. They were providing funds and said we will not give funds to areas that they do this red line around. Those areas, it was racial, right? It's because Black people live there. That's the federal entity that had the biggest hand in redlining.

What I want your listeners to really understand is although we have this racist policy called redlining, when people looked at Black communities, and the Black communities were full of blight, deteriorated houses, they blamed the people living in those communities. They blamed what was visible, and what got off scot-free- what always gets off scot-free are the racist policies, these structural things like redlining. They had no shoulders to bear the blame; only the Black people living in the community.

That's one of the main themes of the book, is really moving from these narratives of personal irresponsibility, meaning your neighborhood looks how it does because you're lazy, you're single mothers, crime, you're criminal, all of these things that we've heard over the years about Black people. Something is wrong with Black people, right? These narratives of personal irresponsibility. We need to shift to these narratives of structural injustice. The community looks like it does because there was a red line drawn around it that prevented investment, and this blight that you're seeing is the inevitable result of the community not being able to get home improvement loans, et cetera, to maintain the community. Shifting from these narratives of personal irresponsibility to these narratives of structural injustice that highlight policies like redlining is the move we need to make.

Brian Lehrer: Moving up the timeline, 80 years ago, 1945, World War II ends, and some soldiers were granted benefits by the Veterans Administration, spurring a new era of homeownership nationwide, but Black vets were largely left out. How much of that was due to the racial covenants you were describing before?

Professor Atuahene: Absolutely. Whether you have a lucrative job at one of the factories, the auto factories in Detroit, or whether you have benefits after World War II, the point is you're trying to buy the best house for your family. When you come back and you're not allowed to live systematically in the suburbs-- and I need to really-- Again, the houses in the suburbs are cheaper, bigger, better amenities like better schools, et cetera, and Black people are prohibited because of racially restrictive covenants from living in these areas. Yes, so the soldiers coming back home don't have the opportunity to accumulate wealth because then they're relegated to these majority Black areas because of racially restrictive covenants and then again, their communities are redlined. The ability to accumulate wealth intergenerationally is really cut down because of these racist policies.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a caller with a family story. Kylie in Northern Virginia. Hi, Kylie. You're on WNYC.

Kylie: Hi. I'm in love with this conversation. The story that I wanted to tell basically falls under the banner of the use of lawyers to preserve Black wealth and how many people, at least anecdotally I know, oftentimes do not bring lawyers into the mix to protect their families. For my family, my grandparents moved to Montclair, New Jersey, and were able to get a house just below the kind of unofficial redlining barrier in Montclair.

My grandmother decades later sold that house to my uncle, which is a very common thing to do, right? The mother or the parent sell their house to the only son. There was nothing written into that contract for my grandmother to make money off the house, or if my uncle were to ever refinance the house or cash or any equity. There was nothing that was done to protect my grandmother's money. My family, it's not that anybody got cheated, but there was certainly a transfer of wealth that happened inadvertently because we did not use advice of a lawyer to write that contract that my grandmother would have been protected from all the money that she put into this house. She just handed it over to my uncle.

I thought that that's another interesting way that housing inequality plays out. Because my friends who are not Black, when they do these kinds of things, usually there's a lawyer, or people who have means, who come from money, usually use a lawyer for these kinds of contracts. Whereas the people I know are like, oh, I sold the house to my son for a dollar or whatever.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting, Kylie. Thank you very much. Professor Atuahene, what are you thinking as you hear that story? Does it relate to anything in the book?

Professor Atuahene: Absolutely. One of the big problems is the problem of heirs' property. Right there in Boston, you have a scholar named Professor Thomas Mitchell who is really the expert on this issue. At least Kylie-- what's her name? At least her family did pass along the property. What normally happens is the property is not passed- the person doesn't write a will whatsoever, and so then a property is passed on through the laws of intestate succession, and then you have multiple people owning the property. When you have multiple family members owning the property, it then becomes hard to do anything with it.

That is another big problem both in rural and urban areas of heirs' property. As your caller just said, that problem, the core of it is because Black and brown families don't have the money, because of access to justice issues, to involve lawyers in creating a will, in creating the transfer documents, et cetera. What most commonly happens is that nothing gets done, and then lots of people own a particular property. In the South, that's a big problem because then what you have is all it takes is one family member to come in and challenge it, and then the property is sold in a fire sale at court and no one gets the money that the land is worth and then the property is broken up. This heirs' property issue is why Black people in the early 1900s owned more land than they do today. If people are interested in learning more about this, again, you should google the work of Thomas Mitchell.

Brian Lehrer: And you should read the book by our guest, which is called Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America. Interestingly, we have another story, family story, I think, that focuses on lawyers or the absence of lawyers. James in Somerset, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, James.

James: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me on. Just want to let you know, my father was an immigrant from Barbados. He was born back in 1892, so this is going back a ways. He tried buying a house in a new development in White Plains, New York in 1930. It was called the Highlands Area. As it turns out, they didn't want any Blacks. He needed to-- He was a dentist, he was a DDS, but he had to get a white lawyer to represent him to hide the fact that he was Black.

A few days before he was to sign for the mortgage, the bank did find out that he was Black and tried to make excuses so they didn't have to sell him the house. Fortunately, his white lawyer who represented him fought very hard and he was able to buy the house, the house I grew up in. As it turns out, Westchester in 1930 wasn't what it is today. There was a cross burnt on the lawn shortly after he moved in. There were other obstacles for not wanting to have a Black person or family in that neighborhood, but my father resisted and stayed. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but there are other stories that I was told growing up. I was born many years after this, but if you want to learn some more about it, my father is in the Schomburg Center, and there's information from his records that I donated there, and you can find out more about his civil rights work and issues such as I'm mentioning now.

Brian Lehrer: Did you say his name? Do you want to say his name?

James: Yes, it's Dr. Errold, that's E-R-R-O-L-D, Collymore, DDS. Again, you can find out more about his civil rights work in White Plains and the lower Hudson Valley that goes beyond just the housing issue, the things that he did to promote the Black presence in Westchester.

Brian Lehrer: James, great call. Thank you very much. Professor Atuahene, I don't know if you're familiar with that name?

Professor Atuahene: Yes, absolutely. No, I'm not familiar with the particular individual, but I do want to just say that his experience of being blocked- of his father had to fight to stay in the neighborhood. Now we have different mechanisms that are threatening the Black presence in certain neighborhoods. Recent research has found that Blacks and Hispanics on average pay a 10% to 13% higher property tax rate than whites, which equals $300 to $400 more per year. Now we have property tax injustice as the more modern version of what's threatening to keep people in their homes.

The story I tell of Myrisha Brown in the book really illustrates this. She's the granddaughter of Grandpa Brown. In 2008, she basically inherits her grandfather's home, which is dilapidated, as we discussed, because of redlining and other racist policies that systematically deprive majority Black neighborhoods of valuable investment. Then city officials overvalued and overtaxed the homes in Detroit, leading to historic levels of property tax foreclosure. Since 2009, one in three homes have completed the property tax foreclosure process in Detroit. We haven't seen this number of property tax foreclosures in American history since the Great Depression. The question is, what is going on?

One of my studies found that between 2009 and 2015, in each of these seven years, the city of Detroit inflated the value of between 53% and 84% of its homes in violation of the Michigan State constitution, and the lowest valued homes, like Myrisha's inheritance, got hit the hardest. In Wayne County, of its 43 municipalities, 3 have a population that is 70% or more African American: Detroit, Inkster, and Highland Park. All three have experienced illegally inflated property tax assessments and tax foreclosures at a far greater rate than the 33 cities with the population that is 70% or more white.

Again, Detroit is ground zero for a national problem. As I told you, I just gave you these national statistics, they pay on average a 10% to 13% higher property tax rate than white. Again, back- and the caller, and that day, it was really these blocks on mortgages. There were different things happening, but these racist policies have really evolved. Now property tax is one of the main sites of policies that are having these racially inequitable results.

Brian Lehrer: Another thing that was interesting to me from James' call, and I wonder if this jumped out at you, was the story he told about his father or grandfather using a white lawyer, I guess, to try to soften the fact to the bank or to the community that the buyer of the house, the prospective buyer of the house was actually Black. Is that a story you've heard before?

Professor Atuahene: Absolutely, absolutely. Without a doubt.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call with another family history. Michael in Baltimore. You're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hi. Thank you so much. This is a wonderful topic. What I just wanted to contribute to it is the author is so true. I'm a little older, I'm 70, but the story that her book relates is exactly what my peers and friends as well as our family experience. Briefly, my family migrated in the early 1920s, late 19-teens from the South from an area Spalding, Georgia, is the county, Griffin, Georgia, about 45 minutes to an hour south of Atlanta. They migrated to Pittsburgh, Akron and Cleveland, Ohio. They did that to work in the steel mills and also with the automobile manufacturers. They also, prior to that, were farmers. They came up for a better way. They were sharecroppers that could not make a living, that's what we were told as kids growing up, and so they gradually-- they even left land that they owned down South and they came North. They came North in some cases even under the threat of violence because their labor was more valuable down South to people who had businesses.

To get to the point, for me what I experienced then is my-- so my grandmother and her siblings actually purchased homes on contract. Financing wasn't available, so I guess what we call today hard money. They had contractors then-- I mean, you bought a house on contract, but they paid more for it. I eventually inherited both my aunts, my grandmother's house. Literally, I got the same-- the value of the homes were not much more than what they paid for them in the '50s and the '60s when I inherited them in the '80s and the '90s.

Redlining, last point quickly. Your author is absolutely correct. The communities, without stating those cities that surround the places I referenced, the property taxes are so high that our friends who still live in those communities can't move into those suburban communities because not that they can't afford the mortgage, it's the property taxes are through the roof. That's it. Thank you so much for this segment.

Professor Atuahene: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much for your story-- [crosstalk] Professor?

Professor Atuahene: Yes, no, the caller is just on point. He's just on point. That's a whole other issue that we haven't yet talked about, Brian, is the caller brought up the issue of land contracts. What is a land contract? Basically, it's-- so a mortgage is when the bank gives you a loan to purchase the house. A land contract is seller financing, so the seller is giving you a loan to purchase the house. In redline communities, this kind of seller financing is the only thing available when you can't get a loan from the banks. Seller financing is the only thing available.

The problem with the land contracts is they don't have any of the benefits of homeownership and none of the benefits of renting. What do I mean? With a land contract, you put down a down payment and then you pay monthly payments, but all of the monthly payments you pay, they look like equity, but they're not because if you miss one payment, then you can lose all of your prior payments. That's one feature of a land contract. Another feature is although it's not real equity, if in fact-- with a rental, you can't rent something to people that is below what we call the warranty of habitability. You have to rent people a place that has minimum level of habitability. When you do a land contract, you have to do no such thing because you're ostensibly the owner. Again, these land contracts, and they're more expensive, they're higher risk, but these are the instruments that people who are denied mortgages, these are the only instruments that they have access to.

Just like the caller's family, they were able to acquire the home on a land contract, but again that is financing at very- it's very risky, very expensive and disadvantageous, but again it's the only thing that many Black communities had access to at the time. That story, sir, really resonates with what I write about in my book, and land contracts is a big part of the story I tell in my book, again, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America. That was just such a great question, sir. Thank you so much for sharing your experience.

Brian Lehrer: Our guest is the author of that book, Bernadette Atuahene, who is a law professor at the University of Southern California, particularly a property rights scholar. In the context of our 100 Years of 100 Things series, it's housing inequality as fostered by government policies at the root of our racial wealth gap, which according to government statistics to this day is 9 to 1, 10 to 1 white wealth to Black wealth in this country. We're so glad to be taking so many interesting and important oral histories from you, listeners, at 212-433-WNYC, about your own families. 212-433-9692.

When we come back from a break, we'll move toward the modern era. We will ask our guest how some of the laws intended to fight housing discrimination like the Fair Housing Act of 1968 have been effective or not. We're going to finish with what Project 2025 has to say about where housing policy should go, and it's very relevant to this conversation, so stay with us.

Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and our 100 Years of 100 Things thing number 65, housing inequality as fostered by racist government policies with Bernadette Atuahene, who is a property rights scholar and law professor at the University of Southern California and author of the brand-new book Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America. We have so many other family histories coming in on the phones, but I want to make sure to get to a few more points of the timeline history with you in this 100-years frame, Professor. 1960s. Civil rights laws are passed, including the Fair Housing Act. How much did it help?

Professor Atuahene: The Fair Housing Act helped a lot. As you may know, the Fair Housing Act is one of the few places where we can still do disparate impact litigation. In our Fourteenth Amendment equal protection jurisprudence, there was a case called Washington v. Davis that really said the only way you can get relief for racial injustice is you have to prove intent. You have to have the smoking gun and show that the people intended to do it. The fact that there were racially disparate impacts no longer could be litigated. We no longer had a constitutional remedy for disparate impact. The only place where disparate impact is still alive and well is in legislation like the Fair Housing Act.

In fact, in Detroit, we-- I told you about all of these illegally inflated property taxes. The law firm of Covington & Burling, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and ACLU of Michigan brought a case for these illegally inflated property taxes in Detroit that I'm talking about. One claim was for obstructive administration of the poverty tax exemption because we had lots of people in Detroit losing homes for failure to pay property taxes that people should not have owed in the first place. That was against Detroit.

Then there was a second claim against Wayne County because of what I explained earlier about this, the fact that the majority Black cities in Wayne County were being subjected to unconstitutional assessments and tax foreclosures at a greater rate than the majority white cities. That claim was a Fair Housing Act claim. Because of the disparate impact, right? We weren't concerned with the intent. We were concerned that these Black cities are having different outcomes than these white cities as a result of the property tax policies in Wayne County. Can I tell you that until this day, the evidence has not been heard?

The case went to the first level, which is Judge Colombo, and he says, "No, no, you shouldn't have brought it to state court. You should have brought it to the Michigan Tax Tribunal." Mind you, the reason why we couldn't go to federal court is because of something called the Tax Injunction Act, which prevents anything dealing with local tax collection from- prevents federal courts from hearing it. We were in state court and they said, no, you have to go to the Tax Tribunal. Appealed. They agreed with Judge Colombo. Went to the Michigan Supreme Court, and they didn't grant cert, which meant that the lower court decision stood, and that killed the case for three reasons.

Number one, the Fair Housing Act has a two-year statute of limitations, but in Michigan, in order to get to the Michigan Tax Tribunal, you have to file a case between February 1st and February 15th. Number two, because the Michigan Tax Tribunal is an administrative agency and not a court, they don't have injunctive power, and that's what the case was asking, for Wayne County to change their practices. An injunction is when a court tells entities to do something or not to do something, and this particular Michigan Tax Tribunal did not have the power to do that. They didn't have injunctive power because they're an administrative agency. Last but not least [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Limitations under the law.

Professor Atuahene: That's right. Last but not least [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to interrupt you, and I apologize, but we have like three more minutes in the segment, and I want to get one more caller in here. Then I want to ask you a quick question about the present and where the Trump administration seems to be going in this respect. Since your book is a comparison of the multi-generational fate of two families, one Black, one Italian, who both started as sharecroppers and then wound up in Detroit, Francesca in the Bronx is going to tell a family story from the Italian side of that equation. Francesca, thank you so much for calling in. I'm going to ask you to do this in about a half a minute if you can.

Francesca: Okay. Hi. My family is from Boston and New York, and I just want to echo what your speaker has been saying. I don't get a lot of white privilege. I don't look white, so people think I don't speak English, all of this. I have that problem, but our family, they changed the definition of white to include Italian, so we were allowed to live wherever we wanted. We were able to get a foothold in these white Jewish neighborhoods where the schools were good, surrounded by college-bound kids. This piece of white privilege completely changed the trajectory of my entire family. There were a handful of kids that were bused in, they called them the METCO kids, from redline neighborhoods, just a handful got the privilege. They had these two-hour bus rides and they were exhausted and they couldn't participate in everything that was going on. I mean, it's a major-- That is the biggest piece of privilege that I feel that I [crosstalk] experienced from our family just having the definition.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Thank you for telling your family story as a contrast with the others and how it echoes the book. In our last minute, Professor, I'm looking at the Thurgood Marshall Institute website and its description of Project 2025's take on housing policy. It says that its main thesis is that housing assistance and other programs to expand housing access produce "intergenerational poverty traps and discourage work, marriage and meaningful paths to upward economic mobility." Quoting from Project 2025. You mentioned disparate impact before; laws that are not explicitly racist but have that effect. I know the Trump people talk against disparate impact as something that they believe in. If there's no intent, there shouldn't be any enforcement. What's your take on what you are looking forward to or dreading coming down the pike?

Professor Atuahene: Yes. The whole thing is the Fair Housing Act, it's an important piece of legislation, but even that can't address the big issues of today, so I just want to close that out. Then to say with the Trump administration, I think this is a conversation that we all need to continue, let me just say that [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: In 10 seconds.

Professor Atuahene: Thursday, February 6th, from 7:00 to 8:30, I'll be at the Harvard University bookstore at 1256 Massachusetts Avenue with special guest Patricia J. Williams, who's a MacArthur Genius Fellow and author of Alchemy of Race and Rights [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: As we leave it there, and forgive me, but we are flat out of time, with Bernadette Atuahene, the book is called Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the book. Thank you for participating in our 100 Years of 100 Things series.

Professor Atuahene: Thank you.

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