by Anita Hill
When I moved to my current neighborhood, which is predominantly white, my young white real estate agent, in an effort to help me feel more at home, provided me with the name and location of a salon where he said I could have my hair done. The salon was owned and run by black women in a black neighborhood. He did not give me any tips on other black businesses.
Black beauty salons are more than places where black women go because they can’t go to white beauty salons, and even more than income bases for many black women. They are places that affirm our identity and value, sites for socializing, and conduits of information. In recent years there has been increasing recognition of the pivotal role of black beauty shops in black communities. Public health officials are now realizing that styling salons can be locations for dispensing important medical information about diseases like cancer and AIDS. In the 1990s the notion first occurred to Dr. Georgia Sadler, a nurse and epidemiologist with an interest in breast cancer prevention and community engagement. Her effort to encourage black women in San Diego to perform breast self-examinations, have regular mammograms, and seek medical help if they found suspicious lumps was successful only after she recruited black hairdressers to talk to their clients about the procedures.
After Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Dr. Sadler’s innovative thinking and her remarkable success in his 2000 best seller The Tipping Point, people took note. In a 2001 address to the Society for Business Ethics, John Dienhart, the organization’s newly elected president and a professor of business ethics at Seattle University, asked the question “Who are our hairdressers?” as a way of expanding on Sadler’s community engagement approach as a model for ethical business organizations. Dienhart proposed a multilevel framework that moved from the personal to the national, starting with individuals and ascending to families, organizations, markets, and social institutional frameworks such as regulatory agencies. Instead of simply asking how individuals influence business organizations, he asked how individual behavior could influence the actions of, say, mortgage lenders or agencies like the Federal Reserve.9
When I spoke with Dienhart, he was quick to remind me that relationships between lenders and borrowers are often based on the borrower’s trust. That was precisely the case for both Ora Lee Williams, who bought from a salesman who came to her home, and Anjanette Booker, who got her mortgage from a broker who helped her buy her first home. Dienhart urges business people to get to know the people to whom they market their products, in order to respond to them in a way that is not only profitable but ethical. He proposes looking at who women like Anjanette Booker are as a means of understanding how to change business behavior. He even suggests that knowing who the “hairdressers” are is the first step in changing the way health care systems and insurers operate.
Dienhart’s framework is another way of expressing what I wanted from my students when I asked them to consider how legal systems should react to people like Ora Lee Williams through the vehicle of courts and act on their behalf through the vehicle of legislatures. The students found it much easier to censure Mrs. Williams’s behavior than to work out how the law should respond to the lack of personal choices available to her. And the larger point that they routinely missed was that by making better law for Mrs. Williams, judges and legislators would be making better law for my students and people they saw as more like them.
If I were to teach the case of Anjanette Booker, I would require my students to study hair. No doubt many would object to the subject as superficial, if not frivolous, and I would have to explain that if they didn’t understand hair, they wouldn’t understand why Anjanette’s chances of succeeding were so good. They might misread her original loan application as a case of predatory borrowing or her mortgage lender’s renegotiation as a bleeding heart mistake. In their future professional lives, they might miss a chance to keep one more woman and her child in their home. But I also want my students to know who the day care worker or home health provider or teacher’s aide seeking a loan really is. As much as anything, I want my students to understand how our persistent devaluation of those things black and those things female undermines our communities and our country, culturally and economically.
With her home safe and her income steady, Anjanette Booker decided to go back to school to get a degree in business. Baltimore City Community College offers a program with classes she can take online. She meets with her classmates occasionally to work on group projects, which is hard because “everyone has a busy work schedule.” She’s set a goal for herself: “I want to finish college before my daughter graduates from high school.” She sees this as her happy ending and enough to make her “very thankful.”
But here I would caution my students: do not think to use Booker’s story as a testament to rugged individualism or an example of how government should “get out of the way” and let people take care of themselves. It is a very American story, yes, but it is not a modern version of the Horatio Alger myth in which, through hard work and determination, a woman faced with adversity is able to achieve the American Dream. To read her story in such simplistic terms is to ignore the racial and gender reality of her experience. With so many people in danger of losing their homes, the jury is still out on whether Booker was targeted for a subprime loan because of her race and gender; but it is undeniable that at numerous points in her life, race and gender exacerbated her problems.
Very few of my students could ever be cast as the lead in the story of Anjanette Booker’s life. Too many elements would have to be changed to make them believable. If you have any doubt, switch the race or gender of the players in Anjanette’s life. Her grandparents’ move from South Carolina to Baltimore for better job opportunities is an American story made all the more powerful and poignant because of their race. The change in her financial status coming out of a divorce is an experience that many women share. The way she was able to recover financially and regain her sense of self through her ability to style hair is a story of both race and gender and what generations of black women have done at home.
With a steady flow of income from her teaching, her salon, and the rent from the property her grandparents left her, Booker prevailed. She told me that in early 2008, when she looked out her living room windows she could see five homes with “For Sale” signs out front. A year later, the neighborhood no longer has the “ghost town” appearance she described. Her neighbors, too, have been able to renegotiate their loans, she presumes. The “For Sale” signs are gone.
A Systemic Solution
Unfortunately, many of Ajanette’s clients from other neighborhoods have not fared as well as she has. Some have lost homes in the housing crisis; others have seen Baltimore neighborhoods ravaged. In response, the mayor and city council sued Wells Fargo for economic losses they attributed to the bank’s lending practices, which were described as a “subprime lending spree.” If the city’s projection of nearly half a million home foreclosures is correct, then Baltimore is in dire straits. To Mayor Sheila Dixon’s credit, she saw the city’s responsibility to Baltimore’s citizens. The problems that lay in the wake of the credit crisis were not going to be solved by individuals, even those as determined as Anjanette Booker. The problems were structural, with impacts that were citywide and thus deserved a systemic solution. In January 2010, U.S. District Court judge J. Frederick Motz, himself a Baltimore native, dismissed the city’s claim in a decision that allowed the mayor and city council to refile their complaint against the bank.10
For five seasons, ending in early 2008, the city’s conditions were played out in The Wire, an HBO television series created by a former Baltimore Sun reporter, David Simon. The program’s content—impending crises in education and housing, corruption, capitalist greed, crime, drugs, high rates of AIDS, racial unrest—foreshadowed Judge Motz’s appraisal that Baltimore’s troubles went well beyond Wells Fargo’s actions.
I was nearing the tenth anniversary of my home purchase in Massachusett
s when the news of Baltimore’s legal response to the foreclosure crisis came to light. Fortunately for me, my neighborhood remained stable throughout the period when many in the state were in distress. As a woman who had bought my home on my own, I was troubled about the number of single women whose savings and dreams had been lost when the housing market collapsed. As a civil rights advocate, I was encouraged by the use of civil rights law to bring some justice to the communities that appeared to have been targeted by unscrupulous lenders. As a professor, I was anxious to use the Baltimore case in my class at Brandeis University, where I taught graduate students about the role of law in advancing social justice.
My students found the case intriguing as well. But as young people raised in an era after the gender and civil rights laws revolutionized individuals’ ability to purchase homes, they were more skeptical than I was. The critical question they raised, and which has not been satisfactorily addressed, is whether any of the individuals who had suffered at the hands of lenders would benefit from an award of damages to the City of Baltimore. In reality, the true losers in this conflict may have left the area entirely, and many who remained are unlikely to be able to buy again, assuming the city reinvests in neighborhoods. They didn’t blame the residents for not suing the bank themselves. If those buyers were too destitute to afford their mortgages, they were unlikely to have the resources to sue one of the largest banks in the country. Yet how effective successful individual litigants might be in encouraging systemic change is uncertain.
I was struck by the hard reality my students’ questions brought me to confront. That reality led me to yet another question about the adequacy of laws to establish and protect rights. Though critical, the protections against racial discrimination in lending articulated in the laws were not enough to protect the individuals in Baltimore, and possibly not even their communities. Though Baltimore was indeed working to restore its neighborhoods, these buyers’ inability to find a place they could call home preceded the “subprime lending spree.”
Moreover, as a country, we cannot continue to urge home ownership as a path to citizenship and equality without directly addressing the disparities in women’s income, as well as the problems Judge Motz highlights. The crisis is not limited to Baltimore, nor to African American women, and its reach is broader than communities of color throughout the country. It is a catastrophe whose roots are deeper than the recent housing market meltdown—it is a crisis in the meaning attached to home itself, for millions of people who have lost their largest tangible asset and even for many who have not. And resolution of this larger dilemma requires us to examine our fundamental understanding of what it takes to make sure people are able to enjoy home as both a place and a state of being.
Chapter 7. Home in Crisis: Americans on the Outside of the Dream
The American Dream: A dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be . . .
recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
J. T. ADAMS, The Epic of America (1931)1
In the months, now years, since the 2008 front-page story chronicling Anjanette Booker’s troubles, the whole world has come to understand and appreciate the depths of the financial crisis that Booker’s situation foretold. Throughout that year, headline after headline described the growing recession, then warned against a possible depression with potential to match the one that followed the 1929 stock market crash. In time, the intensity of the reporting leveled off, as financial institutions were bailed out and salvaged and the structure of our system was restored. By the end of 2010 many market economists were satisfied with the assessment that the financial industry had rebounded. And even if labor economists were not so sanguine about the fact that unemployment was well above the levels of a healthy economy, they were hopeful that with the right policies and public investment, jobs would return. But one large piece of the economic puzzle—housing—remained in jeopardy. Indeed, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research posited that it would take twenty years torecover the six-trillion-dollar loss in housing wealth that occurred between 2005 and 2010.
For me, that revelation spells more than a crisis in the housing market; it signifies a crisis in home, one that threatens our country’s belief in its promises of fairness and prosperity for generations to come. At the heart of the crisis is the ideological disconnect between home as a basic element of the American Dream and pathway to equality, and home as a market product. This disconnect is not new. In fact, it has arguably existed since President Hoover enlisted bankers and developers to help promote home ownership as a route to citizenship. Nor does the philosophical dissonance fully explain the disastrous consequences of the housing market collapse. But in the turn-of-the-century housing market, that discord was combined with the human disconnect between borrowers and financial speculators. The market responded by introducing complex, and ultimately valueless, mortgage-based securities that were entirely removed from the houses themselves and even from the basic mortgage instruments that secured them. In short, for many, the American home—along with our dreams for it—was bundled and reduced to what turned out to be worthless paper.
Before the collapse of what the congressionally empanelled Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) called the “mortgage security pipeline,” the nation’s leading financial institutions created increasingly complex forms of mortgage-backed securities that they sold to pension fund managers, among many other investors in this country, and ultimately to buyers around the globe. According to one executive testifying before the FCIC, the pipeline “functioned fine until one day when it just didn’t.” That is to say, “speculators who flipped houses . . . mortgage brokers who scouted the loans . . . lenders who issued the mortgages . . . [and] financial firms that created the mortgage-backed securities” all profited, off-loading the risk to the next person in line, until the bubble burst and homeowners could no longer pay their mortgages.2
Between now and the end of the twenty-year recovery period that Dean Baker predicts, there will doubtless be numerous reports on financial market disconnect between home loans and collateralized debt instruments. In fact, a 576-page report issued in January 2011 by the FCIC casts blame on presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, financial regulators, and Wall Street for what it is calling an “avoidable” disaster. There are likely to be calls for more, less, and different forms of regulation of the banking industry. But what should not be lost in the policymakers’ ensuing conversations is the human and ideological disconnects that are central to the tragedy and that, in part, explain why the “subprime meltdown” could not be contained. A glimpse inside the string of lawsuits filed against banks provides us with a picture of how that human and spiritual antipathy resulted in an enormous crisis of home as a place and a state of being.
“Those People”
As the mortgage meltdown went into full force, hundreds in Baltimore saw their American Dream vanish. Hundreds of homes went into foreclosure, and a host of associated costs began to pile up. Nevertheless, United States District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz viewed with skepticism the city leaders’ lawsuit aimed at recovering some of Baltimore’s losses. In January 2010, Motz, a Baltimore native, dismissed the claim, citing “other factors leading to the deterioration of the inner city, such as extensive unemployment, lack of educational opportunity and choice, irresponsible parenting, disrespect for the law, widespread drug use, and violence.”3 Judge Motz’s critics would attribute his remarks to his background in law enforcement or what many had long perceived as conservative, probusiness leanings. Over the course of his career in the legal profession, Motz had served as both assistant U.S. attorney and U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland. President Reagan had appointed him to the federal bench in 1985. As a judge, he had heard a number of high-profile cases involving the likes of the Microsoft and Wal-Mart corporations. His “probusiness” label came fr
om a decision he rendered in favor of the latter in a case that challenged Maryland’s legislative attempt to require large employers to provide health care for their employees. Motz’s choice of language in the Wells Fargo case echoed the political rhetoric of the man who put him on the court.4 The federal judge concluded that the bulk of the problems alleged in Baltimore’s litigation against Wells Fargo Bank were due not to the bank’s actions but to flawed government policies (“lack of educational opportunity and choice”), individual neglect (“irresponsible parenting”), or criminal activity (“widespread drug use, and violence”).
Judge Motz’s observations can’t be chalked up to politics entirely. As a prosecutor and a judge, he was perfectly positioned to observe what happened in the city. Frederick J. Motz had lived in Baltimore most of his life. For eight years, during some of the city’s most troubled times, he had been a member of the advisory commission for the City of Baltimore’s Department of Social Services. Judge Motz, like The Wire creator David Simon, portrays a city that few could love.
Mayor Sheila Dixon, a former public school teacher and Baltimore native, knew her city as well as either the judge or the television writer. Dixon’s website described her as a “champion of neighborhoods,” and she ran for office as a promoter of gender equality. During the first year of her term as mayor, she carried out her vision for the city with the help of individuals, community organizers, business people, and developers who shared her “passionate interest in improving” Baltimore’s livability.
