As Congress targets organized retail theft, America still struggles to show the same urgency when Black, Brown, older, and LMI homeowners lose generational wealth through deed theft.
I recently remarked to friends over tea that government officials seem to be more outraged over groups of young adults stealing Gucci handbags than over people stealing houses.
And then I came across H.R. 2853, the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act of 2025, and was reminded of America’s ongoing priority problem.
But I may need to slow down this flow a bit for the uninitiated.
Visuals of teens raiding stores and stealing everything from expensive activewear to jewelry en masse is not new and has received coast-to-coast TV and social media coverage since the pandemic.
Neither is stealing houses.
Y’all generally call this “deed theft” or “deed fraud” but I’m less diplomatic.
H.R. 2853 is new — although the proposed government multi-agency response to organized retail crime that includes coordination with the Department of Homeland Security isn’t surprising.
Most of us can agree that organized retail theft is real. And theft is theft.
But the speed and seriousness of the federal response to retail theft — while financial predators continue to steal houses through their own organized schemes of forged documents, shell companies, predatory transactions, and legal chaos — shows America’s naked-azz priority problem.
Steal Gucci handbags, and the media feeds the emotions that beg for something to be done. Steal houses and the media gets quieter and more local — until a legally complex property battle leads to an elected official getting arrested in Brooklyn — but there’s an absence of any serious discussion of a coordinated solution.
It’s almost funny how even the people who have much less can have heads filled with emotions over fleeting pocketbooks, lululemon leggings, and Versace belts.
But never stolen homes.
And like I said, stealing homes is nothing new. Black and Brown communities have seen their land and wealth stripped away for generations: Jim Crow; redlining; predatory lending; attacks on heirs’ property; A version of slavery that’s about as wild as the Black Codes; and when all else failed, terrorist violence.
In places like New York City, deed theft doesn’t randomly happen.
It targets Black, Brown and older homeowners in neighborhoods flagged for gentrification where property values rise quickly.
And these house thieves have near orgasms when they find homes with dead owners and no will in sight while the heirs lack clean title. These thieves also love homeowners behind in their water or tax bills — after all, tax lien lists are public — or other financial hard times.
In other words, finding many of these house thieves doesn’t require fancy investigative work. Just follow the victims, or people who look like the victims, where they live.
But we’ve learned over the years that America protects the property it really values.
And too often, the wealth held in Black and Brown homes still seems up for negotiation …
song currently stuck in my head: “ah-leu-cha” – gregory hutchinson
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