New book examines the historical mechanisms behind residential exploitation

Rutgers University History Professor Beryl Satter, highlights the financial mechanisms of residential segregation in her new book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America.  The daughter of Mark Satter, a Chicago lawyer who uncovered redlining tactics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Satter highlights the history that is buried in the minds of so many Chicago families, especially hers.  Placing the story of a young African American couple, Albert and Sallie Bolton, at the center of the book, Satter provides personal examples of the hardship endured by African Americans during the Great Migration. The book goes into depth about contract selling, the practice in which landlords sold African Americans overpriced homes, kept the titles until black homeowners paid them off, and charged excessive interest rates to insure they never could. Contract selling cost thousands of migrating blacks their livelihoods and solidified many of the economic disparities in housing and access to credit that social scientists are working to understand today.