When Evelyn Reeves bought her first rental property in 1969, it felt like freedom. Born in Los Angeles in 1941 to a waitress and a postal worker from Alabama, Reeves purchased this four-unit apartment building for just $1,600 down, thanks to a new federal mortgage program aimed at low-income Black homebuyers. “It was a great program,” she recalled in 2018. “You could go in with almost no money.” Using this property as a source of revenue and as collateral, Reeves acquired a tidy portfolio of assets while making her name as a real estate broker.

Now in her 80s, Evelyn Reeves’s success is almost unfathomable today, where one in four Black American households has zero or even negative wealth to their name. Yet policymakers remain deeply invested in the power of homeownership to reverse the growing racial wealth gap and lift people out of poverty. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to promise “reparations” for decades of racist local policies. Since then, the city has disbursed around $1 million in mortgage assistance and home improvement funds for Black homeowners. Such efforts raise the question: Can the magic of real estate really work for everyone?

Two outstanding new books are the latest to investigate this question. In The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America, the historian Andrew Kahrl reveals how the country’s unjust tax system has long undermined civil rights and Black property ownership. Where Kahrl demonstrates the enormous debt owed to Black Americans, The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership, by the literary scholar Adrienne Brown, argues that the American dream of homeowning is itself a source of inequality. Building on work by historians such as Destin Jenkins and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, both Kahrl and Brown underscore not only that race is foundational to the workings of real estate, but also the need to imagine ways of living “in excess of ownership,” as Brown writes, where access to safe and stable housing is freed from the logics of dispossession and accumulation alike.

The Black Tax begins in 1865 with general William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order 15, which allocated Confederate lands and livestock along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina among the formerly enslaved. While President Andrew Johnson reversed Sherman’s order in 1865, less than ten months after it was passed, the promise of “forty acres and a mule” never faded from the Black political imagination. Reconstruction did succeed in creating a progressive tax system, which enabled governments to raise public revenues and redistribute the slavocrats’ wealth. Forced to surrender a larger portion of their ill-gotten gains, however, the planter class made common cause with poor whites by railing against the alleged corruption and profligacy of “Black misrule.” When the last federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, ending Reconstruction, it signaled the return of the white landowners’ rule.

The overthrow of Reconstruction only renewed African Americans’ dreams of land. Given the sanctity of property in the US legal tradition, land, and the reliable shelter and wealth it promised, seemed to convey a more secure set of rights than the paper protections promised by the Constitution. But while land symbolized self-sufficiency, it offered no relief from the predations of white merchants, bankers, and tax men, whose price-gouging, high interest rates, and onerous assessments drove independent Black farmers into debt and destitution as surely as Klansmen dispossessed them by force. “Probably for every acre owned by a black man to-day,” W. E. B. Du Bois mourned in 1909, “an acre has been lost by some other.”

Acts of “bureaucratic racism” reached new heights in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, public officials foreclosed on Black landowners both to reestablish a landless workforce and to enrich private interests. All over the South, these land-grabbing elites also controlled the flow of federal aid. Under the auspices of the New Deal, white communities received new sidewalks, sewer mains, and swimming pools—all violently enclosed by the color line.

By exposing the fiscal side of white supremacy, The Black Tax recasts Jim Crow as not just a racial system, but an economic one. Over the last decade, scholars including N. D. B. Connolly and Matthew Desmond have shown how racial discrimination—far from being “counterproductive” or “inefficient” from a market standpoint—creates profits, fuels exploitation, and enshrines material inequality. For African Americans, the experience of second-class citizenship was not merely “the indignity of being forced to drink from a ‘colored’ water fountain.” Rather, segregation also ensured that resources extracted on one side of the color line were hoarded on the other. Some Americans enjoyed paved streets, routine trash collection, and working fire hydrants, Kahrl shows, because others were denied these things.

In many places, not much has changed. Under “fiscal apartheid,” Black Americans from Baltimore to Ferguson, Missouri, are denied the mundane infrastructure and essential services that protect and maintain human life—public goods their taxes also pay for. Yet this injustice has always inspired fierce and creative forms of resistance. “Wherever Black people secured a measure of local political power, a fight over tax and spending practices and priorities ensued,” Kahrl observes. One of the book’s best chapters details how Black mayors such as Coleman Young in Detroit and Chicago’s Harold Washington pledged to hike taxes on corporate landowners, only to embrace neoliberal austerity under pressure from bondholders and white flight.

One hundred and fifty years on, how does fiscal apartheid end? A careful historian, Kahrl hesitates to present any sweeping solutions or panaceas in the present. No single set of reforms will fix “the inequitable distribution of public goods” or repay the hundreds of billions owed to Black Americans. Instead, he outlines a few ways to narrow the racial economic divide, such as raising taxes on the “one percent” and standardizing the homeowner property tax exemption. Though some readers may leave wanting a more detailed policy vision, The Black Tax should be received as a call to arms: a searing indictment of American racism and inequality in black and red ink.

Where The Black Tax shines a light on the hidden fiscal machinery of US apartheid, Adrienne Brown’s The Residential Is Racial reveals how literary and print culture made racist housing policies appear both natural and desirable. While urban historians still debate the precise ways that racism segregated America, Brown turns the question on its head. She asks, instead, how did the rise of mass homeownership change popular perceptions of race? And why does the idea of “residential living” project such a powerful allure?

Brown begins the story at the turn of the 20th century, decades before the familiar “redlining” era that dominates some recent popular accounts of segregation. When New Deal agencies excluded Black Americans from federal mortgage programs and postwar suburbs, they in fact reinforced years of racist and eugenic thinking in the private sector. The National Association of Real Estate Boards, founded in 1908, required its members to observe the color line or be expelled. Its publications, meanwhile, extolled the healthful qualities of rolling lawns with white picket fences for Anglo-Saxon men made sick and weak by crowded, multiethnic cities.

Despite the real estate lobby’s best efforts, only in the interwar era—a period of global political upheaval—did homeownership become a matter of the national interest. As Secretary of Commerce and later president, Herbert Hoover issued speeches and policies promoting homeownership as the universal ambition of white male wage earners. Access to real estate would inoculate American workingmen against the dangers of “Bolshevism”—a threat closely associated with Jews and other “undesirable” immigrants—and the tramps, agitators, and bomb throwers of the Industrial Workers of the World. By equating private property with Americanism, officials in Washington enforced the idea of homeownership as both a patriotic virtue and a marker of white respectability.

Black Americans have long envisioned a future in which political rights and access to public goods are disentangled from private property.

Yet the Great Depression also challenged Americans’ faith in free enterprise. Fear of foreclosure stalked popular culture, from Broadway plays and Betty Boop cartoons to “the home-threatening tornado” of The Wizard of Oz. Ultimately, stories of dispossession reinforced the homeownership ideal, Brown contends, while drowning out the progressives and socialists calling for alternatives such as public housing.

Take John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which, for all the leftist bona fides of its author, reads as a fable about racial and “residential longing.” Coming out of the Depression, and especially after World War II, countless families realized the Joads’ dream of landed independence, trading the novel’s agrarian setting for homes and mortgages in the suburbs. Thanks to federal subsidies and the GI Bill, the same abstract financial forces that dispossessed the Joads now worked their magic for real-life Okies and other new—and often newly white—homeowners.

In this way, popular narratives laid the groundwork for a postwar “dream of residential whiteness.” At the same time, overt racism became less publicly acceptable; increasingly, the supposed rationality of “the market” disguised the denigration of Blackness in the civil rights era. For this reason, Brown looks skeptically upon the canon of anti-racist art from this period, which struggled to represent the hidden, bureaucratic maintenance of the color line. Consider Norman Rockwell’s New Kids in the Neighborhood, from 1967, in which three white kids peer at a Black brother and sister whose family has just moved in. The illustration suggests, optimistically, that the children’s innocent curiosity might supersede the hatreds of the adult world around them. In this way, Brown argues, Rockwell mistakes segregation as a problem of individuals. While appeals to white sympathy might change a few “hearts and minds,” the artist’s invitation to look is ultimately a misdirection.

Together these books raise the question: Can the magic of the market ever work for everyone?

Evelyn Reeves has long thought so. Over 50 years of renting and selling Los Angeles real estate has afforded her both wealth and endless opportunities to preach the value of Black capitalism. As the former president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, her message found an eager audience in the aftermath of the 1992 LA riots. “We need black ownership, not just jobs” she implored. “Blacks have lived in this community 25 to 30 years and we don’t have a lot to show for it.”

Reeves was right, of course. By the 1990s, the stunning success of a few individuals had hardly improved the circumstances of the Black poor and working class. But around the country, policymakers began to work overtime to make homeownership more attainable. Bill Clinton’s “National Homeownership Strategy,” unveiled in 1995, pledged to create 8 million new homeowners by 2000. For Clinton, like Herbert Hoover before him, access to real estate was a moral issue as much as an economic one. Except now, with the Soviet Union dead and buried, the focus shifted from battling Bolshevism to saving the underclass. “You want to reinforce family values in America, encourage two-parent households, get people [women] to stay home? Make it easy for people to own their own homes,” Clinton opined.

Neoliberal housing policies, combined with Wall Street deregulation, produced a homebuying frenzy in the new millennium. Yet Black and low-income borrowers entered the market on highly predatory terms, locked into risky, “subprime” mortgages whose main purpose was speculation. As Kahrl observes, these “new, untapped markets” consisted of “people and places that had historically been denied access to home financing, who longed for the financial security and wealth-building capacity of homeownership.”

The era of mass homeownership had arrived: a monument to “free enterprise” built on a mountain of bad debt. The crash that followed was therefore not an aberration. It was not the unintended consequence of an otherwise sensible policy goal. Rather, the foreclosure crisis in Black America was the logical endpoint of the overemphasis on homeownership, and an economy fueled by theft.

The history of race and real estate in the United States is proof that homeownership is neither a reliable source of wealth nor a vehicle for Black liberation. Mere access to the marketplace is a poor substitute for the equitable distribution of resources; a mortgage can lift a household into the middle class—or cast a family into ruin. But more than this, policies that heavily subsidize homeowners do so at the expense of the poor and unpropertied. For every dollar of tax relief that flows to renters, Washington lavishes six dollars on homeowners. And by design, it’s the wealthy who receive the biggest deductions.

In our homeownership society, real estate will always be a relentless driver of inequality—a Ponzi scheme that concentrates the greatest wealth and opportunities in the hands of a lucky few. And yet, on both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom.

If there’s another lesson to be drawn from this history, it’s that Black Americans have long envisioned a future in which political rights and access to public goods are disentangled from private property. The Black pursuit of “freedom from kleptocracy,” as Kahrl shows, has inspired community land trusts, organizing against foreclosures, refusals to pay unjust property taxes, and experiments in participatory budgeting. In a brief epilogue, Brown similarly shines a light on the rebellious legacy of Black cooperatives, rent parties, and other collective responses to poverty and the threat of displacement. From these seemingly disparate endeavors, a picture begins to emerge: a society in which security and shelter for some no longer depend on the violent exclusion or exploitation of others.

Taking a cue from Brown’s “perceptual history,” what does a truly just provision of resources look like? For one possible answer, picture the National Mall in Washington. In spring 1968, over 3,000 Americans descended and set up camp on the “nation’s front lawn,” where Martin Luther King had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. Dubbed “Resurrection City,” the weekslong encampment was the brainchild of the recently assassinated King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The sprawling tent city would focus national attention on the nascent Poor People’s Campaign and its demand for a major federal investment in low-income housing. Volunteers built working systems for water, electricity, and sanitation, alongside free health clinics and even a modest “City Hall.”

The experiment failed. The makeshift city collapsed under the combined weight of poor planning and heavy rain. Police arrested nearly 300 mud-soaked occupants. Still, Resurrection City is a reminder that homeowning has not always meant “the natural horizon of citizenship.” Even the encampment’s organizers were surprised by the thousands of poor people who arrived, “propelled by the belief that there must be a better way to live beyond the forms that had so far failed them.”

In one photograph from the encampment, an elderly man, a veteran, holds up a handmade sign. We would do well to look closely at what it says: “Happiness is / a warm dry house / no rats or roaches / lots of good food.”