Cash on the Block: The Broken Promise of Reinvestment in Black Urban Neighborhoods
by Beryl Satter
Harvard University Press, 416 pages
Beryl Satter is one of the most influential historians in the country, even if you don’t recognize her name. Her book Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009) was a major influence on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blockbuster essay “The Case for Reparations,” published in The Atlantic in 2014. The book’s subject, contract lending to black homebuyers in Chicago, formed the basis of Coates’s case that white wealth is based on “plunder.” Coates first learned about Clyde Ross, the black Chicago man who lost his home in an unscrupulous contract deal, around whom the “Reparations” essay is structured, from Satter’s book.
Now Satter is back with a new book on a similar theme. Cash on the Block applies the thesis of the earlier book—that the racial wealth gap is the deliberate result of government policy—to a wider range of anti-poverty programs, from the Great Society to subprime mortgage lending.