Fair Housing Series Part 6: The Racial Wealth Gap and the House That Built It. – Footnotes

And the House That Should Have Been Yours.

1. National Association of Realtors Research Group, Snapshot of Race and Home Buying in America, February 2022. The report documents that the typical homeowner had a net worth of $300,000 compared to $8,000 for the typical renter — a ratio of 37.5 to 1. Among racial groups, the wealth accumulation differential tracks almost exactly with the homeownership rate differential.
2. Bhutta, Neil, Andrew C. Chang, Lisa J. Dettling, and Joanne W. Hsu. “Disparities in Wealth by Race and Ethnicity in the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances.” Federal Reserve FEDS Notes, September 28, 2020. The median white family held wealth approximately 7.8 times greater than the median Black family. The Federal Reserve’s analysis of the National Association of Realtors data on homeowner versus renter wealth shows the homeowner net worth advantage at approximately 40 times that of renters.
3. Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017), 59–75. FHA underwriting manuals from 1936 through the late 1940s explicitly refused to insure mortgages in racially mixed or predominantly Black neighborhoods. The agency’s Underwriting Manual stated that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to use the same community.”
4. Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 113–141. Of the 3,229 VA-guaranteed home loans in Mississippi in 1947, fewer than 2 were made to Black veterans. In New York and northern New Jersey, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill went to non-white borrowers.
5. Realtor.com, 2026 Housing Supply Gap Report, March 3, 2026. The national housing supply deficit stands at 4.03 million units. In high-cost metropolitan markets, the median home price to median household income ratio for Black families now exceeds 7 to 1, making single-household purchase without substantial down payment assistance or family pooling effectively impossible in most major markets.
6. Perry, Andre M., Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger. “The Devaluation of Assets in Black Neighborhoods.” Brookings Institution, November 27, 2018. Homes in Black-majority neighborhoods are undervalued by an average of $48,000 per home, totaling approximately $156 billion in lost equity across the country — a direct consequence of decades of discriminatory appraisal practices that persist in modified form today.
7. Pew Research Center, “The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household,” March 18, 2010; updated analysis, 2023. Multi-generational household formation among Black Americans increased 25 percent between 2010 and 2023, driven by housing cost burdens, student debt, and the strategic recognition that pooled household resources produce better wealth outcomes than single-family household formation.