National Public Housing Museum Exhibit Explores Englewood’s Land Sale Contracts and Segregation
“Inequity for Sale,” an interactive National Public Housing Museum exhibit, opens February 18 in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. (PRNewsfoto/National Public Housing Museum
-- A groundbreaking exhibition sponsored by the National
Public Housing Museum, the nation’s first cultural institution dedicated to interpreting the American public housing experience, sheds new light on an unsavory Chicago real estate practice
in the ‘50s and ‘60s: Selling homes to Black families using
Land Sale Contracts, which imposed excessive monthly
payments on buyers — many of whom lost their properties.
LSCs bred segregation and redlining, cheating families
out of equity built through home ownership.
out of home ownership. Even Federal Housing Administration-
guaranteed mortgages were unavailable to prospective
Black buyers.
Sale Contract homes is planned using the interactive VAMONDE phone app. It will connect the area’s history with Englewood’s
present-day conditions.
Contracts,” Lewis Johnson said. “Having people walk through Englewood and see these properties allows them to interact
with the destructive nature of Chicago’s history of redlining and segregation. It’s a powerful experience.”
billions of dollars from the Black community
traditional mortgages. The contracts allowed them to rent
the homes with the hopes of buying them, but came with inordinately high monthly payments. When Black families
could not make payments, which was usually inevitable due to the loan’s prohibitive rates, they were evicted by the sellers without recourse and lost the homes and payments. As a result, contract holders were unable to build equity in the properties or
own them outright.
gained momentum amid a robust postwar U.S. housing boom,
when many white families bought homes in mostly white neighborhoods with th help of VA home loans provided by the G.I.
Bill. Those VA loans did not exclude Black borrowers, but the loans were administered by banks that often practiced redlining, which limited access to mortgages in Black neighborhoods.
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