At least 30 million people haven’t been able to pay rent since the coronavirus pandemic’s start over a year ago. As eviction moratoria across the country end, this public health crisis has forced the federal government to contend with a basic incompatibility between real estate and housing, market-rate rents and social welfare, life and death. Two federal stimulus packages that allocate $46 billion in rent relief still have not made it to struggling tenants and likely won’t before evictions explode across the country.

In 2018, over 19,000 families were evicted in New York City, with a rate of one eviction per every seventy-nine units in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. According to the Urban Displacement Project, eviction rates are around 300 percent higher for black renters than for white renters. And for tenants struggling to keep up with rising rents, even rent relief can’t fully address the scale of this crisis in a housing system that values protecting property more than it does housing people.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize nominee released last month in paperback, details the relationship between the American federal government and the real estate market from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. Taylor argues that homeownership, enforced by a public-private partnership between the state and real estate, has allowed banks and real estate to extract from poor and working-class black people while preventing the maintenance and expansion of dignified public housing options.