A mere 'bail out' is only one possible solution being suggested. Many people believe they are owed a house as a matter of 'fundamental human rights.' Wait until the Democrats take over the government next year.
'Have I got a surprise for you, my friends,' say two Oregon professors:
Seeking Back Pay on the American Dream
Excerpts:
Two OSU professors argue blacks deserve reparations for decades of homebuying rules that hobbled their prosperity.Judith Pitre was well aware of the Portland Housing Authority's racist history. For 33 years, she worked for the same agency that had colluded to keep her family and other African Americans from owning their homes and from living where they pleased.
Until she retired in 2006, Pitre, 60, oversaw a program set up to help the poor -- many of them black -- get off housing assistance and into homes of their own.
But it often seemed hopeless. Decades of government-sanctioned racial discrimination had entrenched a system that made it impossible for many African Americans in Oregon and across the nation to purchase and profit from housing, barring them from the very gateway to the American dream.
Housing discrimination so hobbled the lives of African Americans that the government should pay reparations, say two Oregon State University professors.
In their study, "Housing Discrimination as a Basis for Reparations," recently published in Public Affairs Quarterly, philosophy professor Jonathan Kaplan and political scientist Andrew Valls argue that government discrimination played a key role in the wide gap in wealth between white and black Americans that exists today. Poverty, Kaplan says, cannot simply be attributed to self-destructive behavior among African Americans.
The median net worth of white families is about $121,000, the study says, compared with $19,000 for black families. Though much of the controversial reparations debate has centered on slavery -- which critics say is impractical to do -- Valls and Kaplan say the magnitude and harm of more recent racial injustices make the reparations case.
"There's a widely held perception out there that there was discrimination in the past but that for the last 40 or 50 or 60 years, African Americans have gotten a fair shake," Kaplan says. "That has not been the case. The degree of state complicity was really quite striking." * * *
The FHA developed a risk assessment for insured loans that rated white neighborhoods highest and black neighborhoods lowest. Homes in black or mixed neighborhoods were generally deemed uninsurable. The GI Bill had similar restrictions.
The FHA then promoted racial covenants, common in Portland, prohibiting African Americans from moving into certain neighborhoods. Even white homeowners who didn't mind living next to black neighbors often had no choice but to buy in all-white areas, Kaplan and Valls say, because they couldn't get FHA loans in mixed neighborhoods.
From New York to Oregon, thousands of African Americans saw the American dream blossom around them, yet faced countless obstacles in cultivating it for themselves. * * *
As in other cities, property in designated black zones was undervalued by white assessors and property values in white neighborhoods were artificially appreciated, says Karen Gibson, a professor in Portland State University's school of urban studies and planning. That triggered white flight, creating central cities, or sections of central cities, that were overwhelmingly black and with few resources.
By the '70s, Portland had more segregation of white and black residents than any West Coast city besides Los Angeles, according to the Indexes of Racial Residential Segregation.
More often than not, African Americans in Portland found themselves renting from a white landlord. Even today, just 37 percent of black Portlanders own their homes, compared with 64 of white residents.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing for reparations. I'm just suggesting that the issue is being developed right now by Left Wing Democrats in DC.
In other words, they made it easier for blacks to buy and harder for whites to buy...
It’s always the other guys fault mentality. The public schools and universities have indoctrinated the minds of our children with the ‘victimhood mentality’ and the smart hardworking conservative needs to pay for it all.