About the Author

Michael Westgate has a unique lens through which to document the work of Gale Cincotta. Cincotta was a genius in identifying the national problem of disinvestment in poor communities. She gathered headlines as she brought activist organizations nationwide to march on Washington under the banner of the National People's Action (NPA). Washington's leading politicians learned to fear, respect, and sometimes loathe Cincotta. But she also needed a program that worked. Westgate, a staff member at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, became her ally in Washington, even accepting her collect phone calls against agency policy. Westgate saw, first-hand, neighborhoods in Chicago where unscrupulous businessmen sold coal laced with rocks, deliberately sabotaging old heating systems. He, like Cincotta, observed realtors using scare tactics to force out elderly white homeowners and sell their homes at triple the price, often to African-Americans unsuspecting of major defects in their first homes. Lenders took advantage of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insurance to collect when mortgages were foreclosed, then "flip" the houses through the same realtors. Westgate began his work at the Bank Board as Assistant to the Director of the Federal Savings & Loan Insurance Corp. (since merged into FDIC). He toured and recommended management changes for FSLIC to deal with 14 failed savings and loan associations in Chicago, based on his successful divestment of failed Republic Savings and Loan in Washington, DC. Having managed housing for the 1000 people living in foreclosed Republic-financed buildings he had personal insight into much of what was wrong with urban mortgage lending. Then, under the chairmanship of Preston Martin, Westgate was asked to join Bill Whiteside as the third employee of today's NeighborWorks America, known then as the Urban Reinvestment Task Force. Westgate had overall administrative responsibility for the growing network of Neighborhood Housing Services programs, based on the original NHS in Pittsburgh, PA. In that role he was instrumental in the formation of the NHS in Chicago and it was there he and Gale Cincotta joined forces.