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Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City
By Antero Pietila
Ivan R. Dee, Publisher
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$28.95 list price
Cloth
336 pp
ISBN: 1-56663-843-7 / 978-1-56663-843-2
Rights: World
March 2010
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Baltimore is the setting for (and typifies) one of the most penetrating examinations of bigotry and residential segregation ever published in the United States. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews have shaped the cities in which we now live.
Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization. The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing policies even into the 1960s, long after civil rights legislation. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of "white flight" after World War II, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The events are real, and so are the heroes and villains. Mr. Pietila's narrative centers on the human side of residential real estate practices, whose discriminatory tools were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.
After the Supreme Court invalidated residential segregation ordinances in 1917, other cities copied another Baltimore tradition: private agreements that prohibited blacks and Jews from specific neighborhoods. Redlining led to blockbusting. When the recent sub-prime mortgage craze began, speculators turned Baltimore into a hotbed of risky lending. It became the first city to sue a bank for alleged targeting of minorities for sub-prime loans that would later be foreclosed. Mr. Pietila's engrossing story is an eye-opening journey into city blocks and neighborhoods, shady practices, and ruthless promoters.
About the Author
Antero Pietila spent thirty-five years as a reporter with the Baltimore Sun, most of it covering the city's neighborhoods, politics, and government. A native of Finland, he became a student of racial change during his first visit to the United States in 1964. He lives in Baltimore.
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