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Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago -- and cities across the nation The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America is a monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America. "Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North."—David Garrow, The Washington Post

As the world's population exceeds an incredible 6 billion people, governmentsâ€"and scientistsâ€"everywhere are concerned about the prospects for sustainable development. The science academies of the three most populous countries have joined forces in an unprecedented effort to understand the linkage between population growth and land-use change, and its implications for the future. By examining six sites ranging from agricultural to intensely urban to areas in transition, the multinational study panel asks how population growth and consumption directly cause land-use change, and explore the general nature of the forces driving the transformations. Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes explains how disparate government policies with unintended consequences and globalization effects that link local land-use changes to consumption patterns and labor policies in distant countries can be far more influential than simple numerical population increases. Recognizing the importance of these linkages can be a significant step toward more effective environmental management.

"Between the 1860s and 1920s, Chicago's working-class immigrants designed the American dream of home-ownership. They imagined homes as small businesses, homes that were simultaneously a consumer-oriented respite from work and a productive space that workers hoped to control. Leapfrogging out of town along with Chicago's assembly-line factories, Chicago's early suburbs were remarkably diverse. These suburbs were marketed with the elusive promise that homeownership might offer some bulwark against the vicissitudes of industrial capitalism, that homes might be "better than a bank for a poor man, " in the words of one evocative advertisement, and "the working man's reward." This promise evolved into what Lewinnek terms "the mortgages of whiteness:" the hope that property values might increase if that property could be kept white. Suburbs also developed through nineteenth-century notions of the gendered respectability of domesticity, early ideas about city planning and land economics, as well as an evolving twentieth-century discourse about the racial attributes of property values. Because Chicago presented itself as a paradigmatic American city and because numerous Chicago-based experts eventually instituted national real-estate programs, Chicago's early growth affected the growth of twentieth-century America. Framed by two working-class riots against suburbanization in 1872 and 1919, spurred from both above and below, this work shows how Chicagoans helped form America's urban sprawl and examines the roots of America's suburbanization, synthesizing the new suburban history into the diversity of America's suburbs"--

This is a reprint of a 1990 book A comprehensive analysis of how cities grow, change, deteriorate and are resuscitated