By Yonah Freemark, Eleanor Noble, Yipeng Su, Kimberly Burrowes, Housing Matters, June 23, 2021
Homeownership is the key way most middle-class Americans build family wealth. And homeownership is especially important for Black families, whose wealth is more closely linked to homeownership than white families. Far more than stocks, bonds, or other investments, home purchasing offers people a place to invest their equity in something permanent, which, in many cases, gains value over time.
But deep structural racism and classism have made access to homeownership inequitably distributed along racial and class lines. Nowhere in the US is this inequity greater than in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, a region encompassing Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and their suburbs, where Black families own homes at less than one-third the rate of white families—the largest gap in the nation.
In new research conducted in partnership with local housing and economic development partners, including the Alliance, the Family Housing Fund, and the Center for Economic Inclusion, we investigated how homeownership patterns have stripped wealth from Black homeowners in recent decades and which neighborhoods have been most affected. We find changes in local and regional policy can reduce homeownership inequities in the Twin Cities, if designed intentionally and implemented effectively.
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