Crain’s Chicago Business
March 12, 2021
By Whet Moser
The legacy of racism in Chicago’s real estate market has been told extensively in recent years. But what was its toll? In 2019, a consortium of researchers from Duke University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Loyola University Chicago put a number to it: $3 billion to $4 billion was extracted from Black communities in the city in the 1950s and 1960s through the practice of contract selling, a rent-to-own model that Black families were forced into by public policy and private markets. Between 75 percent and 95 percent of all homes sold to Black buyers during those decades were on contract.