Plundered

November 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.

December 15, 2024
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.

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May 30, 2025

The American dream sets high expectations for education, employment, and the accumulation of family assets, but overtly racist and bigoted private and governmental actions have often frustrated these hopes. Property law scholar Atuahene's (Gould Sch. of Law, Univ. of Southern California) new book is similar to her first book--We Want What's Ours: Learning from South Africa's Land Restitution Program, a study of the land restitution program in post-apartheid South Africa--but this time focuses on U.S. government policies and programs in Detroit and Wayne County, MI. Many of these policies, like discriminatory tax administration, violated state and federal law, and Atuahene describes them as "predatory governance." As Atuahene experienced in South Africa, these racist and bigoted actions do much more than merely harm their targets' financial well-being; while the victims' property was often permanently lost, they and their families also suffered significant emotional and psychic harm. VERDICT A complex book, but essential reading for audiences seeking to understand the importance of racial and community justice in the United States.--Jerry Stephens

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