Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America

by Bernadette Atuahene

Overview

"Clear. Accessible. Compelling." —Ibram X. Kendi, MacArthur Genius fellow and author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

In the spirit of Evicted, a property law scholar uses the stories of two grandfathers—one white, one Black—who arrived in Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal how racist policies weaken Black families, widen the racial wealth gap, and derive profit from pain. 

When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes.
 
Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atuahene uncovered a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity—a nationwide practice in no way limited to Detroit.
 
In this powerful work of scholarship and storytelling, Atuahene shows how predatory governance invites complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerates communities, and widens the racial wealth gap. Using a multigenerational narrative, Atuahene tells a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they flourish, and who profits.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316572217
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/28/2025
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Bernadette Atuahene is a Harvard and Yale trained property law scholar whose work focuses on land and homes stolen from Black people. She currently holds the Duggan Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Atuahene has served as a judicial clerk at the South African Constitutional Court, worked as a consultant for the South African Land Claims Commission, and practiced at a global law firm called Cleary Gottlieb. She is the author of We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, and she directed and produced an award-winning short documentary film about one South African family’s struggle to regain their land. Atuahene has won several accolades and has published extensively in both academic journals and news outlets such as the New York Times and LA Times.

Editorial Reviews

11/25/2024

Grossly inequitable taxation policies have led to Detroit’s foreclosure crisis, according to this meticulous study. Property law scholar Atuahene (We Want What’s Ours) draws on decades’ worth of property records and over 200 interviews with homeowners and real estate investors to prove there has been systemic overtaxation of Black homeowners in the hundreds of millions of dollars when compared to white homeowners (“Of the 63,000 Detroit homes with delinquent tax debt in 2019, the City overtaxed about 90 percent of them,” ). She shows that the systemic origins of this imbalance are not only an opaque property tax system that keeps homeowners from understanding why they are being taxed, but overtaxed Black homeowners’ lack of access to agencies that could advise them on their options for appeal (unlike white homeowners, who Atuahene depicts as plied with such advice). Atuahene suggests that such obstacles are baked into the system, in order to entrap the uninformed and, in Atuahene’s astute perspective, to cause an “enormous transfer of wealth from homeowners in this majority Black city to government coffers.” Coupling her statistical analysis with profiles of two families—one African American, the other Italian—since their arrival in Detroit in the early 1900s, Atuahene evocatively demonstrates how inequitable taxation contributed, along with redlining and other racist policies, to the families’ divergent paths. It’s a vital addition to the literature on housing inequality in America. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Plundered combines meticulous research and a powerful multi-generational narrative to lift the veil on the ruthless consequences of racist housing policies and expose faulty victim-blaming discourses. Clear. Accessible. Compelling."—Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

"By telling two family stories—the Bucci’s and the Browns’—in one American city, Bernadette Atuahene puts a face on the pain of racist policies that have impoverished our democracy. Plundered is a compelling achievement of groundbreaking scholarship that you can imagine playing out on a movie screen."—Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, author of White Poverty and cochair of the Poor People's Campaign

"In this important and timely book, one of the world’s leading experts on property rights brings to light a secret hidden in plain sight; the bureaucratic machinery that maintains and widens the racial wealth gap in our country. Bernadette Atuahene tells this story across generations, following the descendants of two sharecroppers who settled in Detroit, one white and one black, revealing how racist tax policies fill government coffers while taking bread out of the mouths of the poor. Plundered puts flesh on the statistics and calls our attention to a problem few people knew to look for, revealing the routine nature of what Atuahene aptly calls predatory governance. I won’t think of property tax policy or the functions of government in the same way again."—Reuben Jonathan Miller, MacArthur Genius fellow and author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

"Plundered is an in-depth, human-centered analysis of how the property tax regime undermined Black homeownership in Detroit. Through vivid and complex narratives of the actors in this drama, Bernadette Atuahene shows how a ‘predatory system’ of policies and processes sustained and deepened racial inequality. This is one of the best books I have read that makes concrete one of the many ‘systemic’ barriers that continue to bedevil African Americans in their pursuit of wealth and intergenerational mobility. Based on her active engagement to dismantle these barriers, Atuahene does not only analyze the problem, but she provides us the roadmap to solve it. A tour de force of social science, legal studies, and social change."—Melvin L. Oliver, co-author of Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality and Former president of Pitzer College

"At a time when access to home ownership seems out of reach for so many, Plundered makes clear that this sad state of affairs is the result of a series of systemic failures—much of it aided by government policies. In clear, trenchant prose, Atuahene tells us how we got here and the remedies that are needed if we are to move forward. Plundered is a clear-eyed account of the past and a roadmap for a more equitable future."—Melissa Murray, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Trump Indictments and Stokes Professor of Law at New York University

"In this masterful interplay of ethnography, history, and truth-telling, Professor Atuahene lays bare the racist policies that rob Black families of their homes and undermine Black communities in Detroitand across the United States. Plundered offers a powerful new framework for recognizing—and dismantling—systemic racism."—Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and Torn Apart and Professor at University of Pennsylvania

"Plundered is a startling account of the intergenerational consequences of predatory public governance in America. This study of illegal and excessive property tax assessment is a surprising page-turner, moving, suspenseful, and beautifully told. Bernadette Atuahene begins with the dramatically personal story of two families whose grandfathers migrated to Detroit in the 1920’s to escape impoverishment:  one fleeing Italy’s mezzadria system of indenture, the other running from North Carolina’s violent sharecropping culture of life-sapping labor. Both had no assets to start with. Both found jobs in the auto industry. Both arrived with equal levels of hope, persistence, and determined work ethic. But structures of violently enforced racial segregation drove them into different residential geographies and radically different intergenerational legacies of wealth: the descendants of the African American grandfather still live with the wealth transfers and layered obstructions of blocked access to union membership, federal redlining in mortgage lending, racially restrictive covenants, unavailability of homeowners’ insurance, extortive rates of car insurance, predatory lending practices, selective policing, shockingly inflated property tax assessments, and rampant illegality in foreclosure practices. Plundered reveals a century’s worth of punitively racialized policies that turned one city from a population of homeowners into a population largely of renters, squatters, and the tragically dispossessed.  It is a tale of purposefully crafted inequality–a tale of outright government theft yet hiding in plain sight."—Patricia J. Williams, MacArthur Genius fellow and author of the Alchemy of Race and Rights

“Atuahene…braids personal stories with an analysis of Detroit’s policies on real property to produce an engaging and informative assessment of yet another way that racism permeates American society… Her attention to 'predatory governance,' her revelations of how investors, speculators, slumlords, and governments benefit from property tax injustice, and her acknowledgment of the difficulty of providing safe and affordable homes in Detroit earn her book further praise. As for who is responsible, she is clear: 'Individual efforts are no match for broken systems.' An eye-opening examination of property tax and how it factored into racial injustice.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Atuahene evocatively demonstrates how inequitable taxation contributed, along with redlining and other racist policies, to the families’ divergent paths. It’s a vital addition to the literature on housing inequality in America.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2024-11-09
A dissection of the harm imposed on Black homeowners by Detroit’s property tax regime.

Atuahene, a law professor at the University of Southern California and the author ofWe Want What’s Ours, braids personal stories with an analysis of Detroit’s policies on real property to produce an engaging and informative assessment of yet another way that racism permeates American society. The injustices inherent to the property tax system, she claims, fall mainly on Black homeowners, destabilizing their lives and hampering their ability to build wealth. As evidence, she offers quantitative data on racial disparities along with the stories of two families, one Black and one white: Tommie Brown Jr., a Southerner who migrated to Detroit in the 1920s, and Paris Bucci, who came from Italy in the same decade. Brown and his descendants remained in the city, went into debt due to their “illegally inflated property values,” and eventually lost the family home. The Buccis left for the suburbs and established housing tenure and a stable life. Atuahene’s careful detailing of property tax assessment, state equalization regulations, land banking, foreclosures, eviction processes, and Wayne County’s balancing its budget on Detroit’s flawed property tax makes a convincing case. Her attention to “predatory governance,” her revelations of how investors, speculators, slumlords, and governments benefit from property tax injustice, and her acknowledgment of the difficulty of providing safe and affordable homes in Detroit earn her book further praise. As for who is responsible, she is clear: “Individual efforts are no match for broken systems.”

An eye-opening examination of property tax and how it factored into racial injustice.

Kirkus Reviews