The tax-sale law that allowed someone to steal Ms. Jenkins’s land remains on the books in South Carolina and many other states, and continues to be used to extract wealth from poor and vulnerable communities across America. Tax buying thrived in the wake of the
2008 housing foreclosure crisis, as the number of tax-delinquent homes mushroomed, and today in
gentrifying cities, where rising property assessments function as a self-fulfilling prophecy, predicting the changes local officials hope to bring and forcing low-income people out.
Many local governments have resisted calls to protect homeowners from predatory tax buying and have instead sought to increase profitability for investors; other cities have taken aggressive steps to foreclose on tax-delinquent properties. Between 2011 and 2015,
Detroit initiated tax foreclosures on one out of every four properties in the city, an epidemic of tax delinquency caused, in large measure, by the illegal
over-assessment of lower-valued properties. Then and now, the victims of discriminatory overtaxation and predatory tax buying are disproportionately black.
These continuing practices, more than the government’s broken promise of 40 acres and a mule 150 years ago, explain why black families today have
10 cents to every dollar held by white households and why that gap continues to widen. It’s why the history of black land-taking should be at the center of the reparations debate, not only because the scale of the loss was so great but also because it forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that American prosperity has not bypassed black Americans so much as it has come directly at their expense. It’s no coincidence that African-American communities on the Sea Islands suffered their heaviest land losses in the 1970s and 1980s, the same decades when the area experienced its most rapid economic growth.
Indeed, slavery and Jim Crow not only excluded generations of black Americans from benefits and opportunities enjoyed by white Americans; it also exposed them to the most predatory features of our
capitalist system. It turned black people’s earnest attempts to build wealth the American way — through property ownership — into an opportunity for
others to profit at their expense.
If we ever hope to repair the damage racism has done to America, and address the dividends it continues to pay to white Americans, we cannot simply open to black Americans previously closed doors of opportunity or merely provide some form of compensation for past injustices. We must also work to dismantle the laws and policies that sanction the continued extraction of property and resources from black communities.
Andrew W. Kahrl (
@andrewkahrl) is an associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia.
Any discussion of reparations must include how this happened, who did it, and the laws, policies and practices that allowed it.
www.nytimes.com
Whites like Oldstyle and the standard suspects want to try dismissing things that do not validate their view of race relations in America. No one denies what they present, but it is only half, and that's being nice, of the story. The part I am presenting is the part they refuse to submit to the open. Those who do are ostracized. If someone white presents this, they are called anti white racists. or self hating whites who kiss black ass. If a black person or anyone of color presents this information they are called, whiners losers who are blaming whites for their failures, victims, or racists by the white racists who want to keep this part of history hidden.
The story they want to believe is impossible. Blacks just were not given all the things they claim and just blew it. We as blacks know this. Blacks did not just run off southern land they owned in order to come north. The government did not spend 5 trillion dollars on blacks for welfare but blacks just couldn't cut it. Blacks have been legally freed from slavery by decree but not equality was not afforded to blacks by operation of governments at every level. Blacks have not EVER had the exact same rights as white in this country ever. Words on paper have never mattered to whites except among themselves and even then you have whites who don't honor laws and agreements with one another. So the tall tale whereby blacks have been free for 150 years but somehow have never been able to make it is a false narrative. So is the notion of now that racism was ended 55 years ago that we have complete equal opportunity with no obstacles . And to say everyone had it tough is a lie as well.
The information I posted was an article written by a professor of African American studies. at the University of Virginia. He is an expert, not some white dude with an undergrad degree in history trying to argue in order to support his racist opinion about blacks. Things did not happen as Oldstyle claims. Blacks did not get reparations for damages caused after slavery and those damages are numerous and are part of the reason blacks suffer right now. So the claim being made of what whites did not own is irrelevant and meritless, because the consistent excuses made to deny the damage continuing racism has done is exactly the same thing every other generation of whites have done in America.
Why are you always lying?
First there is the tale from our fiction writer IM2 and then there is the TRUTH.
How Long You Get to Redeem Your Property After a South Carolina Tax Sale
Under South Carolina law, you get a specific amount of time (called a "redemption period") to pay off the tax debt (called "redeeming" the property) after the sale before the winning bidder from the auction gets title to your home.
In South Carolina, you get twelve months after the sale date to redeem. (S.C. Code Ann. § 12-51-90). If you don’t redeem within this time frame, then the high bidder gets a deed (a tax deed) to your home.
Notice Before You Lose Title to Your Home
Between 45 days and 20 days before the end of the redemption period, the tax collector must mail you a notice by certified mail, return receipt requested, which lets you know that the end of your redemption period is approaching. (S.C. Code Ann. § 12-51-120).
How Much Will It Cost to Redeem My South Carolina Home After a Tax Sale?
To redeem your home, you must pay the tax collector the delinquent taxes, penalties, costs, assessments, and interest due to the bidder up to 12%. (S.C. Code Ann. § 12-51-90).
How Much Interest You’ll Have to Pay
The amount of interest you’ll have to pay depends on when you redeem the home.
- If you redeem during the first three months of the redemption period, you must pay 3% of the bid amount.
- If you redeem during month four, five, or six of the redemption period, you’ll have to pay 6% of the bid amount.
- If you redeem in month seven, eight, or nine, then you must pay 9% of the bid amount.
- If you redeem during the final three months of your redemption period, you must pay 12% of the bid amount. (S.C. Code Ann. § 12-51-90).
If you're delinquent on your property taxes in South Carolina, you may eventually lose your home. Learn the consequences of not paying property tax in SC.
www.nolo.com
You send this to Dr. Andrew W. Kahrl (
@andrewkahrl) is an associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia. Tell him what he has researched is a lie. Understand? In short, you are posting policies as if they are followed equally for everyone and we know as black people that does not happen.
You LIE LIKE A RUG!
The population of Detroit Michigan was 952,262 in the year 2000. In 2016 the population of Detroit is 672,795 or a loss of 279,467 citizens. What happens to the value of a property when such a drop in population occurs?
You do love making a fool of yourself, don't you?
I showed you were lying about the procedure to sell a property in South Carolina when taxes are not paid, here is the procedure in Michigan.
- Real property tax delinquency entails a three-year forfeiture and foreclosure process in Michigan. Parcels are forfeited to the county treasurers when the real property taxes are in the second year of delinquency. Real property taxes which remain unpaid as of March 31 in the third year of delinquency are foreclosed upon by the Foreclosing Governmental Unit (FGU). The FGU is responsible for inspecting forfeited property, providing due process notifications and subsequent disposition of the tax foreclosed property. Click on the following links for more detailed information regarding the real property tax forfeiture and foreclosure process.
Property Tax Forfeiture and Foreclosure
www.michigan.gov
Again you go talk to the professor who wrote the article. He documented what occurred and that's the way it happened. Your posting of what is supposed to happen doesn't cover for the FACT that what is supposed to happen doesn't always happen for black people.
You have shown me how the procedure is supposed to happen. This is a common mistake whites like you do when trying to argue against the facts blacks show you relative to racism.
One-Fifth of Detroit's Population Could Lose Their Homes
Many families could stay put for just a few hundred dollars, if only they knew how to work the system.
ROSE HACKMAN
OCTOBER 22, 2014
Evone Brown, a 55-year-old former machine operator, survives on $850 a month from retirement and disability checks, which wasn't enough to cover the roughly $8,000 she owed in property taxes on her home on the east side of Detroit. This year, because she was at least three years behind on her tax payments (most of which she inherited when she bought the house in 2011), Wayne County's treasurer foreclosed on her. As a result, her house is
up for sale this week in Wayne County’s online foreclosure auction, at a starting bid of just $500. She will most likely be evicted this January.
She’s not alone: As Detroit seeks to leave bankruptcy behind and get back on its feet—ramping up development with construction of
a light rail and
a new hockey arena that will cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars—it is simultaneously bearing witness to a process that could evict up to 142,000 of its residents, many of whom are too poor to pay their property taxes.
Detroit is
83 percent African-American, and 38 percent of its population lives below the poverty line. But the older, blacker
Detroit starkly contrasts with a whiter, wealthier new Detroit that's been wooed in by tax breaks and living incentives—which gives these evictions a heavily racial subtext.
This year in Detroit, there have been 22,000 foreclosures on properties whose owners failed to pay property taxes three years in a row. Of those, 10,000 are estimated to be occupied, meaning this year's foreclosures are set to oust
about 27,000 Detroiters from their homes.
That’s a large number in a dwindling city with
fewer than 700,000 residents, but the figures are set to get even worse. In the next couple of months, Wayne County's treasurer will be serving foreclosure notices on 75,000 more properties, 62,000 of which are in Detroit, according to its chief deputy treasurer David Szymanski.* With
half of those Detroit properties estimated to be occupied, this means a further 115,000 Detroiters might lose their homes next year. (There are 110,000 properties in Wayne County that are eligible to be foreclosed on next year, 85,000 of which are in Detroit.)
In a city supposedly trying to attract residents rather than lose them, this means a potential 142,000 Detroiters—one-fifth of the city’s population—will be shown the door within the next year and a half. The city has yet to announce plans for accommodating those who get evicted.
Detroit’s tax-delinquent residents, who together occupy more than half of the city’s properties
according to local data firm Loveland Technologies, are frequently blamed for the city’s underfunded, poorly functioning public infrastructure and are considered part of the reason the city went bankrupt in the first place.
The city’s still relatively new mayor, Mike Duggan, likes to say at press conferences and town-hall meetings that he wants to work with Detroit’s “good” residents—those who seek to pay their bills and mow their lawns. But with little active effort put into retaining residents who are behind on their bills and facing foreclosure, some are beginning to feel like the evictions are a part of a bigger ploy to rid the city of large chunks of its poorer residents—a modern-day form of forced relocation.
“It’s a tragic and extreme version of a familiar pattern,” says Cheryl Harris, a professor of civil rights and civil liberties at the UCLA School of Law. Harris calls the Detroit auction a massive form of “racial dispossession.”
Forced relocation is a sensitive subject in Detroit, where, in the 1950s,
large chunks of poorer, black neighborhoods were razed to make way for highway development. Black residents were violently kept out of whiter areas of the city until the '60s.
Harris says that these evictions should be viewed alongside the “legacy of specifically racialized housing policies that put these [black-owned] properties and these [black] property owners at a distinct disadvantage within the relative marketplace, and located them as devalued to begin with.”
In
a seminal book on Detroit's inequality, Thomas Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, highlighted the long-lasting effects of postwar housing-discrimination policies, including redlining, which categorized neighborhoods with even a small handful of black people living in it as unfit for investment or mortgage loans. (In the July issue of
The Atlantic earlier this year, Ta-Nehisi Coates
extensively mapped how these practices played out in Chicago.)
The establishment of two segregated housing markets strongly favored white people, blocking black people from federally sponsored low-interest housing loans and making them vulnerable to extortion from opportunistic lenders. These dual markets set the scene for Detroit’s 1967 race riots and accelerated the pace of white flight. Ongoing, growing wealth disparities between white and black families—
a recent estimate is that white families are an average of six times wealthier than their black counterparts—can in part be explained by a continuing history of housing discrimination.
Many families could stay put for just a few hundred dollars, if only they knew how to work the system.
www.theatlantic.com
Why couldn't the same incentives have been provided to those blacks already living there?
After all that is how it is supposed to work. I am sure you could post up the rules and the call me a lair because you think the rules are being followed the same for everybody, but they aren't.
And you know that.