Predatory lending dispossessed black homeowners who banks then sold their homes to themselves.

Evidence

Patricia Hill was defiant. A judge had given her 75 days to vacate her beautiful home in the historic Bronzeville section of Chicago. In 2003 she’d obtained a lower fixed-rate mortgage with the intent of using the savings for extensive home repairs. Five years later Patricia noticed that her mortgage payment had increased by 500. “Can't nobody afford 500 extra a month,” she complained. Saxon Mortgage Services said it would correct the mistake. She continued to pay her regular mortgage, only to be told later that her account was in arrears. Patricia was caught in the spider’s web of predatory lending. … Eventually the Bank of New York Mellon sold the house right out from under her—“sold it to itself for about a third of its 2010 appraised value,” Patricia said. … “I never stopped receiving my mail here. I never stopped paying my homeowner’s insurance. I never stopped paying my utilities. They won’t allow me to pay my mortgage. Fine. They won’t allow me to pay taxes. Fine. So everything has been as if I was here anyway, because I was.” As she put it, “This is my reparation.” — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 54

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of the value gap structuring economic dispossession; connects to the reader’s existing frame of the value gap as white lives mattering more, and to foreclosure-crisis literature on predatory lending.
• SEED: The ‘This is my reparation’ posture is an angle on reparations as embodied refusal-defiance rather than legal claim-a possible essay on squatting/occupancy as black reparation practice.