Taylor's "Race for Profit" is a must read




Taylor’s “Race for Profit” is necessary if you want to understand the Black economic plight and the persistence of racial housing segregation in the United States.  She documents in great detail the many failures of HUD public-private housing programs of the 60s and 70s.  Taylor argues programs such as the low-income homeownership program were doomed from the start with the inclusion of the real estate industry, which steered the objectives from increased housing stability and homeownership among low-income Blacks towards providing a steady cash flow for real estate industry hustlers and corrupt bureaucrats. It was no surprise then programs failed as the schemes allowed widespread exploitation, bringing down those they were supposed to help.


Instead of addressing the clear fraud, mismanagement, and neglect of HUD and its private partners, they found an easy scapegoat: Placing blame on the victim's character, the culture of poverty, and the insufficiency of government. Meanwhile, a growing neoliberal free-market ideology takes hold over economic discourse, arguing governments' presence in the economy must be limited to address poverty and spur growth. Neoliberalism transforms the Republican Party, moves the Democrat party to the right, and the problem of urban Black poverty worsens. The new prevailing wisdom leaves Government officials' hands clean and space for alternative narratives of why Black communities remain poor and disenfranchised.


Without work like Taylor’s, these absent details leave dangerous pieces missing in the national story we tell ourselves on race in America. The housing segregation and urban poverty we see today is a causal link between the overt racial covenants and redlining we saw in the 1920s & 40s but also from the negligent HUD policies of the 1960s & 70s that not only pushed back the promise of Black homeownership but allowed the business to profit off of Black communities poverty.  Today's reality is the over-representation of Blacks on the streets and in jails.

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