The Federal Housing Administration (FHA)’s redlining of black urban neighborhoods beginning in the 1930s is well-known-it guaranteed loans to white suburban homebuyers and penalized urban areas with nonwhite populations (Jackson 1985 Hirsch 1983 Rothstein 2017).

Race for Profit complicates the standard urban-crisis narrative of white suburban flight and black inner-city subsidized housing.

Race for Profit makes a compelling argument for the decommodification of housing as the only durable solution to the persistent housing crisis. The book draws from a wide range of sources including Congressional reports and testimony, archives of government agencies and advocacy organizations, legal complaints, interviews, and media coverage. Taylor grounds her analysis in extensive archival research and in conversation with the historiography that it both extends and challenges. The real-estate industry used black people to extract value-racial capitalism in a nutshell. She argues that government incentives, coupled with exploitation by the real-estate industry, and set against a backdrop of racial discrimination and segregation, resulted in widespread foreclosures in black urban communities.

In Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real-Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explores black urban homeownership in the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus on the public–private partnerships that facilitated homeownership programs.

Keeanga yamahtta taylor race for profit