When law professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit in 2017, she intended to study the city’s then-burgeoning squatter movement. A National Science Foundation grant funded what she expected to be an exhaustive examination into the approximately 5000 publicly-owned buildings that were squatter-occupied. But like many well-laid plans, Atuahene’s ideas shifted when she realized that one in four Detroit homes had been confiscated for non-payment of property taxes, the largest group of foreclosures in U.S. history, and she quickly changed her focus to unravel how and why this massive housing crisis had happened.

The result, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America, is an infuriating and sobering read.

Atuahene focuses on personal stories, and the book includes the voices of dozens of people: those who’ve lost their homes, speculators, government officials, and community housing activists, among them. The text centers on two working-class families, one Black and one white, to illustrate what unfolded.

Tommie Brown Jr., affectionately known as Grandpa Brown, was born into a sharecropping North Carolina family in 1901. “Exploitative sharecropping arrangements would not compete with the salaries offered by industrialist Henry Ford,” Atuahene writes, and like many other Black southerners, Brown moved to Motor City. “Restrictive federal immigration legislation passed in 1921 and 1924 drastically reduced European migration, further expanding opportunities for Black workers,” she explains. In 1925, Grandpa Brown was hired to work in Ford’s River Rouge facility.

Although the Depression temporarily limited his job prospects, Brown eventually did well for himself and in 1973 purchased a 6,000 square-foot home that sheltered him and his extended family for decades. Even though “urban renewal” had fractured the neighborhood and the 1967 riots had catapulted most of the city’s white residents into segregated suburbs, the Browns thrived. However, as Atuahene notes, although “lucrative blue-collar jobs allowed Grandpa Brown and his contemporaries to flourish, their children and grandchildren floundered when deindustrialization snatched these jobs away.”  

Brown’s granddaughter, Myrisha, is a case in point. While she struggled to maintain the house and pay the annual property taxes, Myrisha was unable to keep up, and the house went into foreclosure. 

The Browns’ story is juxtaposed with that of Italian migrant Paris Bucci, who also found work at Ford’s River Rouge plant. Like Brown, as Bucci’s economic fortunes rose, he bought a home. But there were stark differences in what they could purchase. While anti-Italian prejudice was still virulent, the Bucci’s were not subjected to the kinds of racial “covenants” that kept Blacks, Jews and Asians out of lily-white communities. Post-World War II suburban development — aided by available mortgage financing and the construction of new, segregated, public schools — helped many white people leave the inner city as their families expanded.  

The term “white flight” represents this phenomenon, but the large-scale movement out of inner cities did more than change the color of communities. It also impacted wealth accumulation, education and employment options. According to Atuahene, “In 2023, the median home value in predominantly white Michigan suburbs like Bloomfield Hills and Royal Oak was $833,100 and $236,600 respectively while the median value in Detroit was $52,700.” Lower property values, of course, are not unique to Detroit. “Nationally,” she continues, “the value of an African American home is about 21 to 23 percent lower than it would be in a non-Black neighborhood.”

And that’s not all. Atuahene writes that tax assessments in Detroit have been inflated for years. In fact, The Detroit News found that between 2010 and 2016, the city overtaxed its residents by at least $600 million. Moreover, a “poverty tax exemption” that is meant to keep people living below the poverty line from having to pay any property taxes at all is currently on the books, but Atuahene found that few people know about it, and others are deterred by the documentation required to get it. As a result, foreclosures have opened the door to speculators eager to cash in. 

Myrisha’s home — her inheritance from Grandpa Brown — is but one example. The house was purchased by a company called DERE, which Atuahene writes “was created for the sole purpose of purchasing homes in Detroit.” DERE bought the property for $36,000 and decided to quickly flip it. “After holding the property for less than three weeks, records show that on January 14, 2019, DERE sold the house to a real estate investment company based in South Florida … DERE sold Myrisha’s legacy for $59,000, making a swift $23,000 profit,” Atuahene writes.

For Atuahene, inflated tax assessments (which, she says, violate Michigan’s state constitution) and rampant real estate speculation have led to “predatory governance.” Also complicit, she writes, are unnecessarily complicated exemption processes, cumbersome payment instructions for those trying to satisfy arrears, and a shredded social safety net that leaves low-income households without a cushion. 

Atuahene writes that racist victim-blaming — the longstanding characterization of Black people as lazy and irresponsible — has led foreclosure victims to blame themselves, rather than systemic inequities, for their personal misfortunes.

“The real culprit behind illegally inflated property taxes and the resulting foreclosures in Detroit is racist policies,” she concludes. “When racist policies are at work, individual bad actors certainly exist, but removing them is not enough to achieve justice … Poor individual decision-making is also an inescapable reality, but changing individual choices alone cannot collapse the larger injustice.”

Grandpa Bucci’s grandchildren have lived the American Dream, becoming well-heeled professionals with successful lives in some of Michigan’s toniest suburbs. For her part, Myrisha Brown continues to rent and work at inadequate-wage jobs despite having a college degree. 

It’s a depressing tale, but Atuahene ends Plundered on a positive note, reporting that the newly-formed Coalition for Property Tax Justice is helping Detroit residents lower their inflated tax bills and assisting low-income people with tax-exemption applications and other relief. Thanks to law student interns, decades of injustice are being challenged—something they hope will spread to other cities where high numbers of foreclosures are taking place.

• • •

Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America
By Bernadette Atuahene 
Little, Brown and Company; 384 pages 
Jan. 28, 2025

The Indypendent is a New York City-based newspaper, website and weekly radio show. All of our work is made possible by readers like you. We’re halfway to our winter fund drive goal of raising $50,000. Please consider making a recurring or one-time donation or subscribe to our monthly print edition and get every copy sent straight to your mailbox.