Month: March 2021

*** Opinion Today: Your house doesn’t know your racial identity, right?

Keywords: home ownership race identity whiteness wealth value declines

Your neighbors and potential neighbors do.

By Jenée Desmond-Harris

Senior Staff Editor, Opinion

 

You know those conversations you have before you get married, when you try to get on the same page about your values and your hopes in terms of kids and money and work and household labor? I remember my husband saying he wasn’t sure about homeownership, because he didn’t think it was a smart way for Black people to build wealth. I was sort of skeptical; I mean, money is money, and your house doesn’t know your racial identity, right?

Yannick Lowery

 

Of course it doesn’t. But your neighbors and potential neighbors do. And as Dorothy Brown explained in an Op-Ed this weekend, their attitudes can inform whether you make or lose money when you sell. In the essay, which is adapted from her forthcoming book, “The Whiteness of Wealth: How The Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — And How We Can Fix It,” she writes:

Black Americans are often unable to build wealth from homeownership in the same way their white peers are, in large part because home prices are generally set by the people who make up the majority of buyers: white Americans. White families typically prefer to live in predominantly white neighborhoods with very few or no Black neighbors. Homes in these neighborhoods tend to have the highest market values because most prospective purchasers — who happen to be white — find them most desirable.

 

That’s depressing. And it gets worse. Brown writes that “research has shown that once more than 10 percent of your neighbors are Black, the value of your home declines.” This is the truth behind our household joke that the real estate agent showing the house next door to ours must have a bad workday when their clients see us in our driveway.

Brown’s piece goes on to explain how the tax code pairs with this harsh, racist reality to perpetuate the racial wealth gap. She makes the case that changes to our tax system can make things fairer, and she’s cautiously optimistic that we might see those changes under the Biden administration.

 

Most of what you’ll read in her piece is not uplifting, but it’s important to understand. And yes, I’ve told my husband he was right.

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