Homeownership in the US has long been stratified by race. The most recent figures from the US Census Bureau (as of September 30, 2018) find that nationwide the white homeownership rate is 73.1 percent compared to a Black homeownership rate of 41.7 percent. One impact of this disparity is that wealth among white people is 10 times higher than it is among Latinxs and 13 times greater than the median Black household.
What to do about those statistics is the focus of a recent interview conducted by Marc Steiner of the Real News Network with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, who recently took the position of chief of equity and inclusion at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC). In his new role, Asante-Muhammad is “work[ing] with community leaders, policymakers and financial institutions to champion fairness and fight discrimination in banking, housing and business.”
So, what can be done? Asante-Muhammad began by underscoring some of the inequity’s historic roots. An earlier study that Steiner references in the interview is helpful here: The Social Structure of Mortgage Discrimination. In that study, the authors examined 220 documents related to fair lending cases resulting from the housing crisis of the Great Recession. According to the summary of historic patterns in the Social Structures report, racial segregation in neighborhoods begins to rise in the early 1900s, with mob violence targeting integrated neighborhoods. By the 1920s, this had morphed into not allowing people of color to buy property in white neighborhoods.
[For more on this story by ROB MEIKSINS and STEVE DUBB, go to https://nonprofitquarterly.org...nership-inequities/?]
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