Beryl Satter, a history professor at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, has been directly affected by the history she wrote about in her book, “Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America,” which The New York Times recently dubbed “an instant classic.”

Satter will deliver the history department’s annual Barry D. Riccio Lecture at 7 p.m. today in the Lumpkin Hall Auditorium.

Charlie Foy, a professor in the history department, served as a research assistant for Satter while she was working on her book in 2001 and he was working on his master’s degree at Rutgers.

Foy said Satter’s father, Mark Satter, was a civil rights lawyer during the 1960s.

Satter represented black clients in Chicago who had purchased homes on contract and fought to open housing to the black community.

Ed Wehrle, a professor in the history department who helped organize the event, said the subject of Satter’s book is relevant today.

“We see many people, particularly in low income and minority neighborhoods, losing their homes as a result of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco,” Wehrle said. “The details are different, but again federal policy allowed lenders to extend loans with harsh conditions to people who could ill afford such mortgages.”

Foy also saw a connection to the recent sub-prime mortgage fallout.

“In both situations what’s present is a lack of oversight by the state or federal regulators,” he said.

“I think part of (Satter’s) argument would be that the lack of vigorous enforcement by state and federal regulators allowed this to occur, in the same way that today the lack of regulators – the treasury, the feds, etc. – looking at sub-prime mortgages until (the housing market) blew up allowed it to continue for an extended period of time.”

Foy said what interests him most about the book is that Satter was able to write it despite its direct connection to her difficult family history.

“She was able to write this really cracker-brilliant book illuminating the larger issues about race and housing in America, while at the same time doing justice to this family story,” Foy said. “As a writer I think it’s a very difficult, emotional task and think she has done so wonderfully.”

Wehrle said he encourages students from the Chicago area to attend the lecture, which is free and open to the public.

“I think it’s going to be a fascinating talk for everyone, but especially for students from the Chicagoland area – almost 2/3 of our students are from Chicago,” Wehrle said. “I don’t think they’ll look at their city in the same way after hearing Satter speak.”

Committing housing fraud

The housing contracts in the 1960s often stipulated that the seller would retain the title of the home until it had been paid for in full, and that the seller could foreclose on the home if the buyers failed to make even one payment, Foy said.

“Mark Satter was involved in challenging those contracts, and in part challenging the contracts by claiming fraud – that a lot of the sellers were not in fact neutral sellers of the homes, but in fact real-estate speculators who hid from the sellers their role,” Foy said.

Foy explained the how the sellers committed fraud.

“These speculators would buy a house, let’s say for $10,000, and then turn around and sell it for $18,000 a week or two later.”

The black families who purchased the homes were not aware they were overpriced, in part because the appraisals they were getting for the properties came from appraisers controlled by the sellers, Foy said.

Then, if the families fell behind the sellers would step in right away, because they had self-motivation; by foreclosing they already had the built-in $8,000 profit, knowing full well up front that the families who bought the homes would be stretched by their cost to begin with, Foy said.

“It’s almost as if the game for the speculator was not ‘make my profit by the sale,’ but ‘make my profit by the sale, the foreclosure and then the resale,'” Foy said.

Jason Hardimon can be reached at 581-7942 or [email protected].