Summary Of Ghetto By Beryl Satter

It is often said that White Americans created ghettos, but forced Black Americans to reside in them. The African American population is often seen as “free loaders”, “refusing to do for self”, and just downright “lazy”. It has become commonplace that Black Americans are blamed for being trapped in “the ghetto” when white Americans and government policy created them. Beryl Satter, in her exceptional work Family Properties, sets out to expose the policy created and enforced by the government with intentions to confine African Americans into a central area of Chicago. Beryl Satter discusses the race and housing discrimination in Chicago during the 1950s and 60s.

Satter begins her story introducing her father, Mark Satter, a Jewish lawyer

The Federal Housing Authority successfully discriminated against and confined African American families to the slums of Chicago by the use of redlining. “Redlining refers to a discriminatory pattern of disinvestment and obstructive lending practices that act as an impediment to home ownership among African Americans and other people of color”. Therefore, black families could not do what most white families could- get a mortgage loan and use it to pay for their property in full. Instead, they only had the option to “buy on contract” which Setter explains is, more or less on the installment plan. Under the terms of the contract, the seller had every right to repossess the house “as easily as a used car salesman repossessed a delinquent automobile. Even if one payment was missed, the contract seller had every right to evict the “homeowner” and resell the building to another

Contract sellers do not in fact “sell the home to a Negro”, he told a journalist, they instead “use the home as ‘bait’ to to defraud the Negro out of a substantial sum of money and then push the Negro out into the street in order to defraud an entirely new family”. Satter explains how contract sellers became millionaires while destroying whole communities. Black contract buyers knew how easily is was for them to lose their homes so it was common that both husbands and wives worked double shifts, neglected basic maintenance, subdivided their apartments, crammed in extra tenants, and sometimes over charged their tenants. The ingenious system often pitted blacks against blacks as the black contract buyers were forced to be their own exploiters. As Satter’s father explained, “the black contract buyer was forced to defraud his own people in order to feed the hungry mouth of the