Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books, 2009), a sweeping examination of the predatory lending practices that transformed racially changing neighborhoods in mid-20th century Chicago into slums, and of the people - the black migrants, the religious reformers, the activist attorneys and the community organizers - who fought back against real estate speculators, the savings and loans that funded them and the Federal housing policies that created the context for predatory lending to flourish. Family Properties offers a new interpretation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1966 campaign to end Chicago's slums, of the tactics and effectiveness of famed community organizer Saul Alinsky and of the origin and meaning of "open occupancy" housing campaigns. Historian David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr., called Family Properties "The most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North." 

Satter is also the author of Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (University of California, 1999). Each Mind a Kingdom is a history of New Thought, a proto-New Age healing faith and an analysis of the reasons for its embrace by late 19th century women's rights activists and Progressive reformers.