Race for Profit: How Banks & the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, Nov. 12

Posted by Penn Urban Studies on October 22, 2019

Date and Time: November 12, 2019, 5:30 – 6:30 PM

Location: University of Pennsylvania, College Hall Room 200

Penn Urban Studies 36th Annual Public Lecture

Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University, will be our 36th Annual Public Lecturer. Dr. Taylor’s talk will draw on her upcoming book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, coming out in October from University of North Carolina Press.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.

Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining’s end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties.

Free and open to the public. No RSVP required.