PLUNDERED

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 of We 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.