Reimagining Equality

by Anita Hill

  But Marla, like so many women whose children have been killed, remains. During his life, Sam had made their house more of a home to Marla. She would not allow his death to take that away. And so Marla pushes out by volunteering each year for her community food and clothing drive. During their 2011 event, Marla stood at her post for eight hours as more people than the previous year came, even though fewer goods were available than her group had been able to collect in 2010. In the face of increasing neighborhood hardship, the urge to move on is strong, but staying is often the best option. The unexpectedly single working mother is determined to remake the house where she has lived for more than four decades, raised three children, and watched her youngest’s life come to an end into the home it once was—not for herself alone, but for her children and now her grandchildren. And for the first time in her life, Marla has accepted that she needs help. Granted, she is not like the many neighbors and friends who have lost their homes in the housing crisis, and for that she is grateful. Yet she still struggles to feel secure, sheltered, and happy in her own home. In reaching out to Ferroll and Sheryl, Marla—thankful for the place that is her home—is restoring home as a state of being.

  I learned a lot from listening to Marla. The idea that the safety of the family depends on the individual homes we build today is a recipe for isolation and disappointment. Making a home in Los Angeles is impossible without a shared sense of responsibility and connectedness that extends not only to Marla’s immediate neighborhood, but to the impoverished one around the corner, where Sam was shot—and even to wealthy Hancock Park, miles away. In all these neighborhoods, families struggle to stay together, safe and secure. And in each there are women like Marla, Ferroll, and Sheryl who, in the words of Nannie Helen Burroughs, are committed to the idea that we are “real Americans” and committed home builders. They are joined by kindred souls whom they will never meet, whose struggle is not only to keep their communities safe, but to find and keep homes within them.

  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. In early 2008, as she was facing the reality of losing her home, many of her customers were confronting the same problem. A year later she proved to be one of the fortunate few who had survived the housing crisis. She still had her beauty shop; she still had her home. She said she had no regrets, avowing that owning her home was worth everything she endured to keep it. As of January 2009, the City of Baltimore was still embroiled in litigation with Wells Fargo, which by then had received $25 million in taxpayer funds from the federal bank bailout that Congress approved late in 2008.

  The world will recall 2008 for a series of catastrophic events. First the housing market crashed. Then we learned that the banking industry was in deep trouble and that American car manufacturers, long in distress, were on the brink of bankruptcy. Individuals from every walk of life and in every part of the United States lost homes and jobs, and often any prospect of getting either back. But for Anjanette Booker, 2008 was just another chapter in a tumultuous life defined more by her resilience than by her trials. When I spoke with her on a Sunday afternoon in January 2009, she had just come home from church. To my surprise, she laughed easily, even as she described some of the hardships and sacrifices of her life and the lessons she learned from them.

  As a child, Anjanette was orphaned by parents who died in their twenties. Like so many casualties of the drug and alcohol culture of the sixties and seventies, they were bright young people who made devastatingly bad choices. In the case of Anjanette’s mother, a poor upbringing was not available as an excuse. In 1963 Anjanette’s maternal grandparents moved their family from South Carolina to Baltimore, where there were better opportunities: better schools for Anjanette’s mom, who was sixteen years old at the time; steady construction work for her grandfather; and work in the households of two affluent Jewish families for her grandmother. They bought a home in a middle-class neighborhood and began to live out the dreams that had prompted them to leave South Carolina.

  In 1965 Anjanette’s mom met a local man, three years her senior and much more familiar in the ways of city life in general and Baltimore in particular. They married. But neither the stability of her parents’ good home nor the birth of two children, Harry and Anjanette, was enough to keep the young woman from South Carolina from the drugs that her husband encouraged her to use and that were readily available in Baltimore. By the time Anjanette was born, her father had become addicted to drugs and alcohol. Her mother would follow suit.

  Heroin, a drug that was in vogue among middle-class whites at the turn of the twentieth century, came into wide use among working-class immigrants in the 1920s. African American urban youth discovered it in the 1950s and 1960s, though it was rarely the drug of choice for white suburban youth. Addiction to the opiate remains widespread in Baltimore, which currently has the highest per capita rate of heroin use in the United States. The city where Anjanette and her father were born has become something of an urban laboratory for antiaddiction research, but that came years too late to save Anjanette’s parents.

  Her father died f
irst, and soon after, her mother. Anjanette and her brother Harry went to live with their grandparents. They gave them a home, and along with it the safety and security they needed as orphans. “We went to church every Sunday, and after church we went to my uncle’s house,” Anjanette recalls. “He didn’t go to church, so after service we took the church to him.” When the “two services” were over, Anjanette, her brother, and her grandparents went home for dinner. Throughout her childhood and into her early adult life, Anjanette’s grandparents were “always there, every step of the way. They worked hard to make sure I had whatever I needed,” though her grandmother took pains to make it clear that “I’d have to stand on my own two feet.”

  Anjanette did. When she married, she and her husband, both cosmetologists, opened their own beauty salon. After renting an apartment for a year, they decided to buy a house, which made more sense than putting their money into a rental that cost too much and meant “you always had someone living over you or under you.” A mortgage broker helped them find financing, and their mortgage payment was roughly the same as what they had been paying in rent. Things were going well for Anjanette. With her grandparents’ guidance, she put her parents’ death in perspective and moved into adulthood strong and whole.

  But tragedy struck again. This time Anjanette’s grandparents were the casualties. Ironically, the work that had enabled them to live their dreams turned on them. First her grandfather learned that years of toiling at one construction site after another had exposed him to toxic levels of asbestos. Years of washing her husband’s work clothes had exposed Anjanette’s grandmother as well. They were both diagnosed with asbestosis. Her grandmother died first, and her grandfather’s will to fight his own illness steadily evaporated. Within months he was dead too.

  They left Anjanette the family home in Baltimore and some property in South Carolina. She rented out the house and kept the taxes up on the South Carolina land. She and her husband earned enough from their beauty salon to pay their mortgage and send their daughter to private school. “I tried the public schools, but they were just terrible—fighting and old textbooks, lead in the water, heating systems don’t work, teachers aren’t trained.”

  At this point, Anjanette might have begun to believe that her troubles were coming to an end. Despite all the bad fortune she had experienced, she was doing relatively well. She and her husband were proud parents. They had a successful business that kept her in touch with the community. But a few years after her grandparents died, Anjanette came to the realization that her marriage was over. She and her husband agreed they should get a divorce, dissolve the business, and live separate lives.

  A Place to Call Her Own

  Anjanette went back to the same mortgage broker she and her husband had used when they bought their house. This time she went alone, but with her grandmother’s steely resolve and her husband’s advice in the back of her mind: be sure you get a fixed rate. She left the broker’s office with a $130,000 loan for the home she’d chosen in a mostly white neighborhood. Two years later, when her monthly payment of $841 more than doubled, she realized for the first time that she had signed up for an adjustable-rate mortgage.

  In the not-so-distant past, home buyers were typically married couples. Nowadays more and more unmarried, widowed, and divorced women, with and without children, are making the choice to purchase a home. Women on their own have become a key component of the real estate market. In Baltimore, 40 percent of all home sales made in 2006 were to single women. Across the country, single African American women account for half of the home purchases made by black people. For many of them, purchasing a home is an affirmation of independence, as it was for Anjanette Booker. Home ownership meant that she could stand on her own, without her grandparents and without her husband.

  More Like a Man

  In December 2006, a year before Anjanette Booker’s story appeared on the front page of the New York Times, the Consumer Federation of America tried to alert the nation to the fact that subprime lenders were targeting women. A twenty-four-page report on lending practices in the year 2005 gave plenty of details about the disparate treatment of male and female borrowers but got very little attention from regulators or from the public in general.2 Newspapers across the country picked up on the research and began to hint at the possibility that there might be racial and gender discrimination in this lending market. In November 2007 a New York Times story on subprime lending raised the question “What’s Behind the Race Gap?” but gave no definitive answer.3 An Associated Press analysis of 2007 census data showed that the impact of the historic real estate bust that began that year had fallen disproportionately on Latinos, blacks, Asians, and other minorities.4

  Researchers were skeptical of the subprime lending market long before the public took any interest. Elvin Wyly, a professor of urban studies at the University of British Columbia, began measuring racial disparities in subprime lending during the crest of the housing boom. He found that from 2004 to 2006 these disparities actually grew, even though there was no decline in the credit ratings of minorities during that period. Though Wyly did not run the numbers on gender disparities, he noted that if “there is an overlapping of race and gender, it’s a good bet that one would find a very strong relationship.”

  Why would a woman commit herself to the uncertainty of a subprime loan? Why would Anjanette Booker and so many women like her get themselves into such a financial predicament? Questions like these filled the media in the wake of the housing crisis, and it’s not much of a stretch to hear underneath them the question memorably asked by the “eternally noble” professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, a musical about his attempts to transplant his psyche into the mind of the unschooled Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Higgins, the tutor, accuses Doolittle and all women of constantly fixing their hair and neglecting their flawed ways of thinking.

  Our imagination for the “proper” way for women to act is often as limited as Higgins’s. When women face financial trouble, our default response is to blame it on their bad or foolish behavior. When things go badly for a woman, as they did for Anjanette Booker when she couldn’t make her mortgage payments, we expect her to presume that she needs to fix herself rather than question the system. We want her to ignore the history of bad credit experiences that she and other females have lived with.

  In fact, despite the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act—giving women, whether married or on their own, the right to obtain credit in their own name and protecting against other kinds of credit discrimination—there is evidence that even today, women seeking loans are treated differently from men. Women borrowers are overrepresented in the subprime lending market, according to studies done by both the Consumer Federation of America and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Across the economic spectrum, women receive less favorable terms than similarly situated men on home purchase, refinance, and home improvement loans, and the gap between women and men who get subprime loans actually increases at higher income levels.

  Elderly women are prime targets of refinance and home improvement subprime lenders. Women on average live longer than men and have a greater chance of living alone. Rising property taxes and medical expenses make older women on fixed incomes particularly susceptible to lenders who promise money for necessary repairs but charge huge fees and inflated interest rates.

  Rather than asking why women don’t behave differently, the better question is why women are overrepresented in the predatory and subprime markets. As one woman put it, “I think so much of this is targeted into the inner city, you know? Do they go after us because we are black or poor? How do they find this out?”5 There is ample evidence that certain loan applicants are marks. As a former loan officer testified under oath, “If someone appeared uneducated, inarticulate, was a minority, or was particularly old or young, I would try to include all the [extras at additional expense that] Cit
iFinancial offered.”6 Not until 2004 did the Federal Reserve require subprime lenders to provide any specific data on their loans. Even today, subprime lenders resist any effort to provide information about the risk profiles of borrowers. And as Elizabeth Warren, an adviser to the president on the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told me in a 2007 conversation, what we do know is that many women who qualified for conventional loans did not get them and that “they and others were being fleeced.” Warren, seemingly unlike most policymakers, has the uncanny ability to put herself in the place of female debtors with limited options, perhaps because in 1978, as a twenty-nine-year-old divorced mother, she was one.

  Gender, Race, and Credit

  For thirteen years I taught a case called Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Company in my first-year contract class at the University of Oklahoma’s law school. The plaintiff, Ora Lee Williams, was a mother of seven living in Washington, DC, in 1962 on a monthly government stipend of $218. I don’t know whether she was black, but she lived in a predominantly black neighborhood in a predominantly black city. The students often assumed she was black because of where she lived and her economic status.

  The course was required, and the students were randomly chosen for my section. Like the school’s student body in general, they were mostly white and middle class, with a few black and fewer Native American middle-class students. Typically the men outnumbered the women, but only slightly. Their average age fluctuated from year to year, but most of them were twenty-somethings fresh out of college. Over those thirteen years, I taught the case to nearly one thousand students, and I never had one who matched the profile of Ora Lee Williams, though some may have had family members who did. Once I did have a student who was the mother of four children, but she and her husband were financially very comfortable.