We Have to Talk About Stripping: What’s been extracted from communities is so much more than financial wealth

The term “wealth stripping” has been around for a few decades, and it covers a lot of waterfront. Broadly, wealth stripping is the use of power to undermine people’s financial security and unfairly extract assets from people with less power. When coined, the term mainly referred to financial instruments that contribute to the extraordinary costs of being poor, like payday lenders and rent-to-own (rarely getting to the owning part) outlets that thrive(d) in lower-income communities, where people had few options for standard-interest loans. When the subprime mortgage bubble burst, we saw that the downstream effects of predatory lending were also wealth stripping: foreclosures and the resultant loss of credit and equity <a href="https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/26/wealth-stripping-why-it-costs-so-much-to-be-poor/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">hit people of color more broadly and far deeper than whites</a>. And unlike having a couch repossessed, homes in foreclosure can depress the value of surrounding homes. Home equity loss is contagious. <a href="https://medium.com/@katya_3596/we-have-to-talk-about-stripping-f3f8db9f609b">Click Here</a>