Black Homeowners Are Worse Off Today Than They Were 40 Years Ago

[applegrove]

Black Homeowners Are Worse Off Today Than They Were 40 Years Ago

by Kriston Capps, Citycab/Huffington Post

http://www.businessinsider.com/black-homeowners-wose-40-years-renters-2014-7

"SNIP........................


One of the compelling aspects of Ta-Nehisi Coates' cover story for The Atlantic last month making the case for reparations is that he focuses more on housing inequality in the 20th century than slave labor in the 17th through 19th centuries. Indeed, that was the key to telling whether someone bothered to actually read the essay before commenting on it. As Slate's Ben Mathis-Lilley pointed out, Coates' narrow focus on the practice of redlining in Chicago "turns the issue of race in America into a pressing discussion about work, wealth, and theft rather than an unresolvable grudge-match about bygone guilt." ("Narrow" being a relative term for a 16,000-word essay.)

Coates' story observed how difficult it is for black residents in Chicago to make and keep their homes. Now there's research to show how much harder African Americans struggle as homeowners. A new study demonstrates that, despite significant gains in residential equality, white households still have an advantage over black households when it comes to homeownership. Worse still, the changes in the market that led to the foreclosure crisis have essentially wiped out the gains made by black homeowners since the 1970s.

The report, which is the work of sociologists Gregory Sharp at Rice University and Matthew Hall at Cornell University, focuses on the racial dynamics of homeownership exit—i.e., when an owner becomes a renter. Even granting the shifts in the housing market both before and after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (which prohibited housing discrimination based on race), the matter of homeownership exits remains understudied, according to Sharp and Hall.

"This issue is especially salient in light of recent reports on the racially uneven impacts of the housing crisis, but more importantly because of the enormous advantages that homeownership confers—to wealth accumulation, accessibility to valuable public services and amenities, community engagement and civil life, and less exposure to violence and other social ills," the report reads.



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[applegrove]

1. Bush said he wanted an 'ownership society'. He was at the very least

totally uninformed. Which is criminal for a President to be.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

2. Sheer stupidity is the most charitable excuse for Bush's many

destructive policies.

If you're not being charitable, you have to assume that his policies actually had the effect he wanted to achieve, which is a whole order of magnitude more disturbing.

[applegrove]

3. Yup. You have to wonder if it wasn't the latter. As the chinese said

about following the George W. Bush economic model "why would we take are brightest people, potential engineers, and put them in the financial markets where they would come up with algorithms for the rich to take money from the everybody else?" (not verbatim but you get the picture)

[GeorgeGist]

5. Making money without actually producing anything ...

is the American dream on cocaine.

[onehandle]

4. So are white homeowners.

And yet they vote against the black president who wants to help them.