Mapping Inequality
Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Residential Security Map for Queens, New York, 1938.
Tedeshis, agreeing to repay them for the next 10 years. Without that agreement, the Spellers could not have afforded the house.
Although purchase money mortgages offered a non-traditional path to homeownership, the terms of the loan were still precarious and exploitative. For the next decade, the Spellers made not one but two monthly payments: one to the bank for the older conventional mortgage and another to the Tedeschis for the purchase money mortgage. In addition to requiring double payments, the personal contract included harsh stipulations. One of the clauses stated that the entire sum, principal and interest,“ shall become due... after default in the payment of any installment.” If the Spellers missed even a single payment, they would immediately have to fork over the entire $ 3,025( about $ 33,000 in 2026 dollars). One missed paycheck, one medical emergency, one major car repair away from the risk of foreclosure, their suburban dream sat on fragile ground.
Over time, the contract became a crushing obligation. Bradie Speller’ s father took great pride in their new home, spending most weekends mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges. But to keep up with the double payments he continued working two jobs, day and night, long after the
move. He was often so exhausted, Speller recalls, that“ he’ d come home and go straight to sleep.” Whereas white suburbanites increasingly experienced mortgage debt as an opportunity, as a route to upward mobility, the Spellers felt it as a burden that extracted wealth.
Through these and other financing techniques, people of color joined the suburban migration. Due to mortgage redlining and other exclusionary practices,
Postcard of Roosevelt, New York, 1910.
Roosevelt was one of the few places on Long Island open to Black Americans. An unincorporated hamlet of one square mile, the tiny suburb offered something of a haven for migrants like the Spellers. As of 1960, one in five of its 11,000 residents were Black, and most of them were clustered in a 15-block section in the southeast corner. Back in the 1920s, speculators had chopped the land into gridded lots, hoping to quickly resell them. With the collapse of the real estate bubble, most of those ventures went bust. Many lots remained vacant 30 years later, with several roads unpaved and unfinished. Lifelong resident Dora Mackey-Smith remembers growing up in a rugged environment:“ On one side of the street it was houses, on the other side it was woods.”
Due to the half-empty blocks, much of the area lacked basic public services. Like other unincorporated hamlets, Roosevelt did not have a sewer system, instead relying on individual septic tanks or cesspools for waste disposal. Most houses in the Black section were not even connected to a water system, forcing residents to draw water from backyard wells. Cheap land and meager infrastructure kept the housing affordable, but only by saddling residents with all the hazards of speculative development.
Like Bradie Speller’ s parents, many of the newcomers used unconventional mortgages to buy their houses. James and Dorothy Revis also obtained a purchase money mortgage from the departing white owner. Except in the case of the Revises, the terms of the loan were even harsher.
Freeport Historical Society www. MoAF. org | Winter 2026 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 17