Signs announcing “We Buy Houses for Cash,” are tied to lampposts, taped to surfaces, slipped under doorways and stuffed into mailboxes in neighborhoods across America. The signs may seem innocuous. If you own a house, calling the number on the sign will connect you to an interested buyer — “win-win”.  But in reality, these signs represent something much uglier. They perpetuate the racism of America’s housing market, just as they reflect and ensure the precarity of homeownership for African Americans. 

“Bandit signs,” as they are often called, encourage homeowners to sell quickly and for low prices to buyers who then resell at higher prices, pocketing profit at the expense of distressed sellers and stripping Black communities of wealth. Sellers lose, predatory investors win. It is but one iteration of the racism in housing that African Americans have endured for generations, including restrictive covenants that forbade the sale of homes to Black individuals, redlining to deny mortgages and insurance, and a devastating practice known as “contract selling.” Black homeowners, regardless of income, have also been targeted for high-risk and costly housing loans known as subprime mortgages. Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for mortgage-backed securities produced devastating numbers of foreclosures. The result? A landscape of signs announcing “We Buy Houses for Cash”

This exhibition, which ran at the Mmuseumm in New York City, displayed signs from Philadelphia’s East Mt. Airy and Germantown neighborhoods, but they are an all too common sight in many Black communities.