In 2017, property law scholar and ethnographer Bernadette Atuahene set out to study urban squatting in Detroit – a city where an estimated 22 percent of properties lay vacant. During her project, she discovered a different legal issue that wreaked havoc on the city and contributed to the vacancy problem: illegal property tax assessments. Many of her neighbors were “holdover” squatters. Unlike “takeover” squatters who move into properties where they had no previous connection, “holdover” squatters had a prior relationship with the house – typically as an owner whose house was foreclosed. Many of her interviewees lost their homes because their properties were taxed at rates that were violative of Michigan’s constitution. Between 2011 and 2015, the local government confiscated one out of every four Detroit homes for failure to pay property taxes. Atuahene pivoted from studying squatters to property tax foreclosure and this book was born.

The first part of Plundered is historical in nature and makes two important moves. First, it describes the arc of housing discrimination on a national level and in the specific context of Detroit by showing how redlining practices prevented African Americans from securing federally backed mortgages, while racial covenants kept them out of the budding suburbs. Against this background, Atuahene describes the parallel stories of two sets of sharecroppers – Grandpa Brown who migrated from the South and Grandpa Bucci who emigrated from Italy. Both moved to Detroit in the early twentieth century and were able to purchase homes, but because of the aforementioned forms of racial discrimination, Bucci could avail himself of opportunities that Brown could not. As Detroit bled jobs in the second half of the century and practices like subprime lending gained a foothold in African American communities, the trajectories of these two families diverged. The descendants of Grandpa Bucci inherited a financial asset in need of little investment in a neighborhood replete with social services, whereas the descendants of Grandpa Brown inherited a money pit that had improvement costs that exceeded the value of the home in a neighborhood beset by disinvestment.

The interior parts of Plundered become more ethnographic and describe the mechanics of foreclosure. The reader spends much time with Grandpa Brown’s granddaughter Myrisha as she toils trying to preserve a house with a litany of problems while navigating a labyrinthine maze of legal issues faced by similar residents who had their homes taken. First, Detroit’s Office of the Assessor taxed her home as if it were worth approximately $80,000 even though neighboring houses were valued at about $12,000, and more importantly, despite her house having no functioning shower, tub, or heating system, amongst other issues. Detroit’s historic bankruptcy and austerity measures decimated this office, which meant an understaffed team used flawed data to make speculative guesses about property values, as opposed to going out and conducting property inspections. More problematically, there was an exemption for low-income individuals like Myrisha that allowed them to forgo paying property taxes, but residents like her did not know about it, and the city did not advertise it. Those who knew about the exemption encountered unnecessary barriers when they tried to obtain it. When homeowners were able to challenge these assessments, the City lost with frequency, which means a small minority of homeowners could challenge this government-induced home theft if they had the time, capital, procedural know-how, resources, and grit to navigate the appeals process. Without these benefits, thousands of people lost homes that they were entitled to keep.

Parts III and IV of Plundered also spend meaningful time looking at and talking to actors who are not residents, many of whom benefited from what Atuahene calls “predatory governance.” These include: diverse investor types such as local entrepreneurs who wanted to stabilize neighborhoods while making a profit; investors from different parts of the globe who were concerned primarily with maximizing returns and limiting costs; and politicians who recognized the problem of using these questionable tax assessments to fill their coffers but felt like they have few choices considering the austerity of the moment. In these sections of the book, as is the case in others, the author painstakingly resists caricaturing these individuals as villains and instead shows how they make morally complicated choices amidst structural constraints and injustice – unfortunately at the expense of Black homeowners.

The book concludes with illustrations of grassroots resistance – namely the work of the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, which set its efforts on stopping unconstitutional property tax assessments, ending the foreclosures that stemmed from this illegality, and compensating homeowners who were subject to these foreclosures. Their activism and a larger web of litigation against Detroit helped lead to the creation of new mechanisms that would prevent these kinds of unreasonable assessments and provide easier access to property tax exemptions for low-income homeowners.

Some may prefer a qualitative, “detached,” and neutral approach to scholarship. Atuahene conducted more than 200 semi-structured interviews for this project – many of which were with overtaxed homeowners – and she resists feigning. A concluding methodological note provides information about her ethnographic process. She is clear that the project does not take the typical “disengaged” approach and is deeply intertwined with the work of housing activists. Besides showing why lawyers and law professors need to venture beyond doctrine and into the lived experiences of people – a lesson that social scientists grasp and actualize more readily – the book stands out for its strong moral stance on displacement alongside empirical documentation. For people who are inclined, Plundered provides a template for how researchers and law professors can be aligned with local grassroots movements without sacrificing the analytical or methodological attention that good scholarship demands.