Fighting housing injustice

Professor Bernadette Atuahene follows up her research and community organizing with a new book, ‘Plundered’

Between scholarship and community organizing, Professor Bernadette Atuahene has been busy.

After uncovering racialized property tax inequity in Detroit, she published a series of law review articles detailing the roots of a tax foreclosure crisis in this majority-Black city. But her work was not done.

“Most academics stop there,” says Atuahene, who was named Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professor of Law at USC Gould this fall. “I’m not most academics. I’m an organizer. And so, we got to work, and we created an organizing campaign, and we’ve been working to solve the problem that the research identified.”

Meanwhile, Atuahene has also been writing a book about her five-year investigation into Detroit’s property tax foreclosure crisis, exposing a system of predatory governance where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity. Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America will be published on January 28, 2025 by Little, Brown and Company.

“The book uses Detroit to talk about the various racist policies in America that really undermine Black homeownership,” Atuahene says. “It starts with racially restrictive covenants, urban renewal, redlining, blockbusting, predatory mortgage lending and, most recently, illegally inflated property taxes.”

Plundered follows two families — one Black, the other white — showing how racist policies affected each family’s trajectory. Both of the grandfathers came to Detroit to work at Ford Motor Company in the early 1900s. One was a sharecropper in Italy; the other was a sharecropper in North Carolina.

“Both families worked really hard. But because of the skin color of one of the families, they had drastically different outcomes,” Atuahene says. “The book, through storytelling, allows you to really see and feel and hear from the people themselves what these racist policies are like, how they impacted their lives.”

When Atuahene, a leading property scholar whose work focuses on land stolen from Black people, first got to Detroit, she planned to study squatting. Instead, she discovered something far more pernicious.

Between 2009 and 2015, the City of Detroit overtaxed 53–83% of its residential properties in violation of the Michigan State Constitution, which says no property can be assessed at more than 50% of its market value. Between 2010 and 2016, Detroit overtaxed homeowners by at least $600 million. Wayne County foreclosed on one in three Detroit properties for failure to pay these inflated property taxes, displacing over 100,000 residents since 2009.

“One in three — we haven’t seen this number of property tax foreclosures in American history since the Great Depression,” Atuahene says.

In her previous articles and upcoming book, Atuahene details other findings about this housing injustice: the illegality was borne by the lowest-valued homes; local governments had illegally inflated property taxes and foreclosure rates in majority-Black neighborhoods at a far higher rate than majority-white neighborhoods; and, when controlling for other variables, 10% of all foreclosures would not have happened but for the illegally inflated property tax assessments. One in four of the lowest-valued homes would not have gone into foreclosure but for those illegally inflated property taxes. Her most recent article detailing these findings, “A Theory of Stategraft” published in the NYU Law Review in 2023, received the Law and Society Association’s 2024 Article Award.

When Atuahene interviewed government officials in charge of property tax administration in Detroit, they all blamed the crisis on personal irresponsibility.

“But as we began our work, we found that the real reason was structural because of these illegally inflated property taxes in a city where already 40% of the people live below the poverty line,” she says. “We were able to shift the narrative from one of personal irresponsibility to one of structural injustice. That is one of the most important outcomes of my work.”

Another consequential outcome would be the #BlackHomesMatter movement she spearheaded. A community organizer since before law school, Atuahene established the Coalition for Property Tax Justice through her nonprofit Institute for Law and Organizing. Comprising over a dozen grassroots organizations, the Coalition has three goals: stop illegally inflated property tax assessments, stop illegal foreclosures, and get compensation for impacted homeowners.

USC Gould students have been involved in those efforts as part of the Public Interest Housing Practicum — with incredible results. In one year alone, the student-run Property Tax Appeals Project (PTAP) appealed tax assessments and foreclosures for 550 homeowners and prevented 13,000 foreclosures; they also secured property tax exemptions for low-income families, advocated for housing assistance that brought millions in federal relief, and laid the groundwork for a program to compensate homeowners.

Atuahene hopes Plundered will bring more attention to the work of the Coalition and to predatory governance as a national issue. Nationally, Black and Latino homeowners pay a 10% to 13% higher property tax rate than white homeowners on average. Accordingly, the PTAP has already branched out its efforts to Chicago and Milwaukee.

“The book really helps America understand what these racist policies are about.”