Equity

The dual financial system affects not only Black and Brown consumers, but Black- and Brown-led firms. In the past two years, CDFIs have focused on shifting access to capital for developers.

What explains the large disparity in Black and white student debt, and what can we do to address the student debt crisis and close the racial wealth gap?

Disproportionate amounts of medical debt contribute to the racial wealth gap. What can be done?

Debt related to justice-system involvement falls most heavily on overpoliced communities, extracting wealth and preventing the building of more.

Typical approaches to closing the racial wealth gap focus on ways to help Black households build wealth. But for that to stick, we must also stop siphoning their wealth away.

A lot of conversations about the racial wealth gap focuses too much on homeownership as the only solution. It’s much more complex. Shelterforce’s Miriam Axel-Lute talks with Anne Price, president of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.

Solutions to address racial wealth inequality have often focused on behavioral changes and individual choices, minimizing efforts to dismantle structural barriers to wealth accumulation for Black Americans.

We’ve been carrying out asset-building strategies for decades now, but the wealth gap has not shrunk. What needs to be done about it?

Seventy-one percent of jobs that pay $40,000 and above require a four-year degree, says Maurice Jones. That requirement is “having a huge, huge adverse impact on Black talent earning their way into the middle class.”

American Hospital Association’s NOVA awards honor hospitals’ success in addressing social determinants of health.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are under a congressional mandate to improve investment in three specific kinds of housing markets—but Congress didn’t say by how much, and advocates say they could be doing far more.

In Oakland, the Black Cultural Zone ties together art and community ownership to prevent gentrification and heal trauma.