Family Properties

January 19, 2009
In the early 1950s, Mark Satter opened his law practice in the Chicago suburb of Lawndale, but his life's work really began in 1957, the day a black couple, Albert and Sallie Bolton, walked through his doors needing a stay on an eviction from a home they had just purchased. Satter uncovered a citywide scheme, in which landlords sold African-Americans overpriced homes, keeping the titles until black homeowners paid them off, while charging excessive interest rates to insure they never could. Called “contract selling,” the practice cost thousands of migrating blacks their livelihoods. Mark Satter died of a heart condition eight years after the Boltons crossed his threshold, but nearly 50 years later, his daughter, Beryl, a history professor at Rutgers, picked up where he left off. Setting out to prove that the decline of black neighborhoods into slums had nothing to do with the absence of African-American resources and everything to do with subjugation and greed, Satter draws on her father's records to piece together a thoughtful and very personal account of the exploitation that kept blacks segregated and impoverished.

Starred review from February 1, 2009
Thirty years after her fathers death, Satter began to look closely at the history of a man who tried to help black families keep homes they had purchased under exploitative contracts and ended up impoverishing his own family. Her approach offers a personal and broader historical look at the unscrupulous real-estate practices used in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s that destabilized neighborhoods. Mark Satter took on clients facing eviction by speculators who sold them houses in racially changing neighborhoods at grossly inflated prices; when the home ownersmissed a payment, the speculator foreclosed and resold the house. Behind the fraud was the acute shortage of housing for black families caused by racial segregation. In part 1, Satter recalls her familys personal history, the history of Jewish immigrants in a Chicago neighborhood, and her fathers hard work to provide financial security for his family and to represent black families. In part 2, she chronicles her familys financial ruin, her brothers bitterness, and the ongoing struggle of her fathers clients as they developed a contract-buyers league that legally challenged long-standing and shameful real-estate practices.A completely compelling look at the shameful history of housing segregation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)