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A young family of three seen from the back as they look at a house. From right: A light brown-skinned man with shaved head and chin whiskers in a blue chambray shirt and khakis points to the house, at something out of frame. His other arm is around a black-haired woman in a narrow-striped button-up white shirt over blue jeans. One of her arms is around the man's waist; with the other she holds a small dark-haired child in a pale blue top and black leggings and no shoes. The house is white with brown window trim, and a sold sign in one window.

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Homeownership

Moving Beyond the Holy Trinity of Racial Wealth Gap Answers

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?

Equity

Maurice Jones on Job Creation, Community Development, and Wealth Building

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.”

A realtor opening a house for viewing.
Equity

Realtors Reckon with Race

A new generation of real estate agents are aiming for meaningful change in an industry most famous for championing and enforcing segregation.

Community Control

You Can’t Carbon Copy Community Ownership

Community development has long made attempts at wealth building, with a focus on trying to find successful or innovative models that can be replicated. And yet the transformational change we’ve […]

Equity

Valuing Black Lives and Black Cities

Andre M. Perry’s Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities reveals the web of historical and contemporary socioeconomic barriers that maintain the racial wealth divide and does this through personal narrative, history, and an exploration of a wide array of social issues.

Equity

Stop Talking About the Racial Wealth Gap

It may seem counterintuitive, but in order to close the wealth gap, we must shift our focus from the gap itself to the policies, conditions, and systems that spawned it.

structural sinking boat
Equity

Financial Coaches, Let’s Be Upfront About Economic Structural Racism

Financial education messaging is too often presented as if individual behavior and attitudes are the cause of our growing economic challenges rather than our social, economic, and political systems.

CRA oped
Community Reinvestment Act

Protecting the Community Reinvestment Act Is an Investment in Economic Justice

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation just released a set of proposed rules for the Community Reinvestment Act that threaten the very heart of the law.

houses
Financial System

Can Estate Planning be Used to Help Preserve Economic Assets in Low-Income Communities?

Estate planning should be employed as part of a broader plan of preservation of wealth and assets in communities of color. 

Housing

Is the Housing Market the Answer to the Racial Wealth Gap?

In discussions around closing the racial wealth gap, we should be reminded that a very large portion of wealth gained by white Americans should be seen as ill-gotten.

A black and white photograph from 1942 of a sign that read "We want white tenants in our white community."
Equity

Just as I Suspected, Paying Rent Is Racist

Every month millions of Black Americans hand over half of our livelihood to the descendants of those who forcefully brought our ancestors here to work for free. Essentially, America is in the business of charging its captives rent.

Financial System

Context for the Racial Wealth Divide May Free American Minds, and Mindsets

Black people were excluded from many of the income and wealth-building programs that helped build the foundation of white Americans’ wealth today.