A Dream Foreclosed: As Obama Touts Recovery, New Book Reveals Racist Roots of Housing Crisis

As President Obama heads to Phoenix today to tout the "housing recovery," journalist Laura Gottesdiener examines the devastating legacy of the foreclosure crisis and how much of the socalled recovery is a result of large private equity firms buying up hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes. More than 10 million people across the country have been evicted from their homes in the last six years. Her new book, "A Dream ForeclosedBlack America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home," focuses on four families who have pushed back against foreclosures. "The banks exploited a larger historical trajectory of discrimination in lending and in housing that has existed since the beginning of this country. The banks intentionally went into communities that had been redlined, which meant that the federal housing administration had made it a policy to not lend and not to guarantee any loans in minority neighborhoods all throughout most of the 20th century that didn't supposedly end until well into the 1960s," Gottesdiener says. "And they exploited that historical reality and pushed the worst of the worst loans in these communities that everyone knew were unpayable debts that Wall Street knew."

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