Gabriella’s Reviews > Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership > Status Update

“This drive on the part of powerful players in the [real estate] industry came to shape the priorities of programs intended to serve the poor, leading to the homeowning disasters that opened this chapter while providing the industry—with renewed assistance of the federal government—with expanding opportunities for profit.”

“Black real estate and political operatives often acted as ‘middlemen’ who were especially interested in further developing a Black housing market and the business opportunities expected to follow...essentially ‘brokers’ who ‘emphasized balance, compromise, negotiation, and cunning,’ as they worked to enrich themselves while performing these kids of functional roles in African American communities...”

“If Nixon was hoping for a calm transition from the grand ambitions of Johnson’s ‘urgent task’ of solving the urban housing crisis to quiet neglect, Romney was not the right man for the job.”

I am learning a lot about the role of George Romney, Nixon’s HUD Secretary, in this “horror story of racial capitalism.” EX: how did his reliance on free market ideology have a hand in this all going so wrong?

“But with little resolution to the persisting attitudes within the real estate industry and among bank lenders, along with weak anti-discrimination laws and enforcement...It was becoming clear that transforming the law was far different from transforming the attitudes of the federal agents charged with enforcing the new laws of of those within the private agencies where the new policies would be implemented.”

"The greater the sense of 'crisis' in American cities, the greater the perceived value added to exclusive white suburban communities...the proposition of a "dual market" was misleading...there was a single United States housing market that was defined by its racially discriminatory, tiered access--each tier reinforcing and legitimizing the other."