Racism and Exploitation in Housing in Chicago

Read the NYTimes review of a recent book by Rutgers historian Beryl Satter, the daughter of civil-rights attorney Mark J. Satter. Here's an excerpt:

Ms. Satter, chairwoman of the history department at Rutgers University, balances personal stories, including moments of great bravery, with painstaking legal and historical research. She persuasively and devastatingly argues (turning conventional wisdom on its head) that the true cause of black ghettoes in Chicago was financial exploitation — not the “culture of poverty” or white flight. She goes further, linking this kind of financial exploitation to today’s subprime mortgage crisis, an earlier example of greedy lenders pushing people “to take on more debt than they could handle” and charging inflated interest rates.