Reimagining Equality by Anita Hill

Author:Anita Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2011-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6. Lessons from a Survivor: Anjanette’s Story

Home: The place where something is discovered, founded, developed, or promoted; a source.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

On Sunday, December 14, 2008, the Boston Globe featured as its home of the week an 1895 Victorian cottage. With four bedrooms, a small library, and a large porch flowing to a landscaped garden, it was much like the tasty little cottage Booker T. Washington imagined and built. The asking price was $719,000. With a down payment of $70,000, the monthly payment on a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage at 6 percent would be more than $4,000. Especially in today’s conservative lending climate, in order to qualify for a mortgage of $650,000, a potential buyer would need to show nearly $175,000 in annual income. The median income of the inhabitants of the Greater Boston area is $62,000. Women in Massachusetts earn on average less than half of that, $30,300 annually, as 55 percent of them work in low-paying domestic and professional service jobs.

If Washington’s cottage was out of reach for most black Americans when he first proposed it in 1895, it was no less so over a century later. Owning a home, and thus acquiring this piece of the American Dream, had become increasingly difficult for people of color and single women. Indeed, realistically, this way of showing one’s belonging and civic participation remains out of reach for many of them and millions of other Americans today. But over the last two decades, pragmatic assessments of the housing market didn’t stop the real estate industry and the government from aggressively pursuing policies that promoted home ownership. These policies affirmed the centrality of the idea of “home” in the American imagination. But for millions of Americans, the reality of purchasing and paying for a home would become the stuff of nightmares, not dreams, as predatory and subprime lenders joined the campaign.

A Survivor’s Tale

In January 2008 the mayor of Baltimore, on behalf of the city of her birth, filed suit against Wells Fargo Bank. Citing the possibility of nearly half a million home foreclosures, mayor Sheila Dixon alleged that Wells Fargo had engaged in “reverse redlining,” a practice banned by the Fair Housing Act. The complaint accused Wells Fargo of targeting African American communities in its marketing of deceptive and predatory lending options and then disproportionately foreclosing on the residents of those communities.

The same month, a front-page article in the New York Times told the story of Anjanette Booker, a black woman in Baltimore. “Four years ago, Miss Booker bought a brick row house for $130,000, taking a subprime mortgage because she had a low credit score. Her initial payments were $841 a month. . . . After two years, her mortgage payments shot up to $1,769.” Though she borrowed money from her former husband and from friends, she could no longer keep up with the payments.1

The divorced mother of a teenage daughter, Anjanette Booker operates a beauty shop called Vixxen in a mostly black neighborhood of Baltimore.

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