Only the mortgage interest deduction survived the 1986 tax reform intact.

Evidence

The real estate lobby is quite effective at getting what it wants from Congress. After all, the only personal interest that survived the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was the deduction for mortgage interest. But here is where history can help us: The real estate lobby’s open complicity in the discrimination against prospective black homeowners should go a long way toward muting them. We have to keep reminding the real estate lobby of the things that happened to black people at their hands, to make them less formidable opponents this time around. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1291

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: using historical complicity in discriminatory real estate practices as a negotiating lever to neutralize a powerful lobby — an unexplored pathway in remedy design.