So often we'll be out here or we'll be inside and we'll come outside,
and there will be White people standing right there on the stoop
reading, and it's like, this is trespassing, and if you opened your
front door and saw a Black guy standing there right at your front
door, you'd be like, "Cops."
If she were to show my mother that house, she would lose her job.
In those days it was that blatant.
I've had agents invoke burning crosses.
But that's just the difference in like feelings of ownership.
In the United States, home ownership is seen as the most effective way
to build generational wealth, with the average homeowner having a
household wealth of $231,000 compared to the average renter having a
household wealth of just $5,200.
But data shows discriminatory policies left many Black Americans out
of the economic picture, and the problem is only getting worse.
In the second quarter of 2019, Black homeownership hit a 50-year low
of 40.6%.
In fact, if you look at the 100 U.S.
cities with the largest population of Black households today, every
single one of them shows a growing divide between Black and White
homeownership. It has a lot to do with today's frameworks and a lot
of the structural barriers, discriminatory barriers, redlining issues
in communities, and also issues with access to credit in our housing
finance systems. According to Urban
Institute data, the current gap between White and Black homeownership
sits at about 30%.
That's larger than the 27% point gap that existed in 1960, before the
Fair Housing Act was passed.
The Fair Housing Act in 1968 was passed right around the same time as
the Civil Rights Act. That really enabled and essentially abolished
the ability for real estate property owners and others to
discriminate on the basis of race, sex and a whole host of other
critical factors.
It was just a little over 50 years ago that that was enacted, so this
is very recent history.
Fair housing policies are so recent that stories of blatant housing
discrimination still echo for Black Americans.
When my parents went to go purchase their home in Toledo, Ohio, my mom
actually wanted to buy a home in a predominantly White suburb called
Sylvania, Ohio.
The real estate agent explained to my mother that she could not show
my mom the home because we were Black.
And she explained to my mom that if she were to show my mother that
house that she would lose her job.
So she took my mom to a community in Toledo where she said they were
moving Black families who are kind of like in our income bracket.
Rice was just six months old when her family moved into their home in
1963. At the time, they were the only Black family on the block.
By the time she started kindergarten in 1968, her neighborhood was
predominantly Black.
That's how quickly the neighborhood changed because of real estate
blockbusting and steering practices.
Blockbusting is a now-illegal tactic used by real estate agents and
developers who convince White homeowners to sell their homes out of
fear that racial minorities will move into the neighborhood and lower
property values. Steering is the unlawful act of limiting where you
show a person a particular home based on race.
As our neighborhood was designated as what they called then a
"changing neighborhood," meaning the real estate community and the
lending community understood that Black people would be moving into
this area, the lenders began redlining the area.
Redlining is a practice that was started in the 1930s by the Home
Owners' Loan Corporation, where neighborhoods would get color grades
based on perceived mortgage security.
At the time, neighborhoods were coded as green for type A, blue for
type B, yellow for type C, and red for type D.
Type A neighborhoods were viewed as financially reliable, while type
D neighborhoods were viewed as financially insecure.
But here's where it gets ugly.
Type D neighborhoods were predominantly populated by Black families,
meaning that even if a Black person living in that area was
credit-worthy, banks would still deny them.
So when my dad went to his bank to get a loan, the loan officer
actually told him, "Mr.
Rice, we're not making loans in that neighborhood." In those days it
was that blatant.
Like, "We're not making loans below Upton Street." And so that's why
my parents had to go to a subprime lender.
Subprime loans became a fixture in redlined neighborhoods, and though
redlining was outlawed in the 1960s, its impact still has lingering
effects on Black people today.
Over the last 40 years, property values in redlined neighborhoods
gained half the value of those in green-lined neighborhoods.
By the '90s, subprime lenders started pushing adjustable rate
mortgages, which are loans that typically start off with low interest
rates and then drastically increase
after just a few short years.
We saw payments increasing by 50%.
So imagine if one month your mortgage payment is $1,000 and the next
month your mortgage payment is $1,500.
It's a huge increase.
This increase in adjustable rate mortgages led to more borrowers
refinancing their homes every two to three years, slowly stripping
them of their equity every time they made a payment.
According to Rice, brokers pushed subprime loans because they were
making a lot of money doing it.
In fact, between 1994 and 2000, the amount of new subprime mortgages
grew from $35 billion to $140 billion.
Between 2004 and 2007, Hispanic Americans and Black Americans were 78%
and 105% more likely than White Americans to have a high cost
mortgage. Consequently, Black and brown families were
disproportionately impacted by the 2007-2010 housing crisis, with
both groups being nearly twice as likely as White families to lose
their homes. Before the housing crisis hit, the median net worth of
Black households was a little over $12,000, compared to the nearly
$135,000 net worth of White households.
By 2009, those net worths dropped to about $5,700 and $113,000
respectively. While redlining and subprime loans robbed Black families
of the opportunity to build wealth in the 20th century,
there was something just as insidious on the horizon: gentrification.
In major metropolitan areas that were once predominantly Black,
homeownership levels have drastically shifted as a result of
gentrification and rising housing costs.
Gentrification involves the renovation of properties and businesses
in underfunded neighborhoods, which some see as a positive thing.
The negatives come when long-term residents, who disproportionately
tend to be people of color, are pushed out of those neighborhoods
as the neighborhoods begin to be well-resourced.
Between 2000 and 2013, more than $135,000 residents in 230
neighborhoods across the country were displaced from their homes due
to gentrification.
Like, we withstood all this shit.
We're still withstanding.
I definitely feel less at home than I used to, but also kind of more
at home because of the businesses.
They give me hope. They give me a sense of ownership that I've known
them longer than the wave.
Parker has watched a wave of gentrification transform his
Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.
Parker's parents purchased their brownstone home for $90,000 in 1985.
Today, similar properties in his neighborhood sell for well over $1
million. So a lot of my family lives on this block right here.
These two houses, these are my mom's best friends.
Most of the businesses in Parker's neighborhood are still
Black-owned, but home ownership has changed drastically.
And a lot of that has to do with marketers and developers literally
changing the name of the neighborhood to suit affluent buyers.
The whole renaming and remarketing of Bed-Stuy into Stuyvesant
Heights, it's an old name, and then there was never a stark
difference. It's more like regional than lines, but now they're trying
to call the whole Bed-Stuy, Stuyvesant Heights.
It's a marketing ploy because Bed-Stuy has now a history, so that it
becomes more palatable for these parents to pay for their kids to
come live here. Since the 1930s, Bedford Stuyvesant has been a
predominately Black neighborhood.
As of 2000, the Black community made up three quarters of the
population. By 2015, that number dropped to half.
Parker's parents retired after the 2008 recession, but the family has
three other tenants to lighten the financial burden.
And while their home value has increased significantly since 1985,
Parker says refinancing is difficult because of his parents' retired
income. As he's gotten older, Parker understands how important home
ownership is for his family's long-term financial stability.
If your parents own a home, help them keep the home.
Okay? Contribute.
Make an effort.
Do some work around the house.
Do anything that will guarantee your...
How can I say this? Your legacy?
Your legacy, yes.
Gentrification is taking place in Black and brown neighborhoods across
the country, but not all families are as fortunate as Parker's.
In Detroit, a third of the city's properties have foreclosed since
2008 due to rising costs and tax inflation.
A January 2020 investigation by The Detroit News found that
homeowners in the city were collectively overtaxed by at least $600
million dollars following the Great Recession.
Homes in the cities are being assessed at a value that was much
higher than the market rate.
This overtaxation of local properties led to Michigan's Black home
ownership rate dropping from over 50% in 2000 to 40% in 2016.
In a 2020 report from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, it
was shown that on average, Black and Hispanic residents bear a
10-13% higher property tax burden than White residents nationally.
According to experts, county assessors have historically overtaxed
Black residents as a form of punishment for economic mobility.
This practice of overtaxing Black residents has only gotten worse
with the surge of gentrification.
So what we see, unfortunately, is people are being squeezed out on
multiple fronts as gentrification happens.
And if cities want to prevent this from happening, they have the
power to do that.
They can adopt tax lean and tax forgiveness programs to help people
stay in their homes as the values are rising.
They can adapt homestead programs so that long term residents who
have been living in the communities for a long time are able to stay
as the communities become more wealthy, so to speak.
Recent studies show that housing discrimination is still prevalent
today. A three-year investigation released by Newsday in 2019 found
that real estate agents in Long Island, New York asked for different
financial qualifications from White homebuyers than they did from
Black and brown homebuyers.
The report also found evidence that many agents still practice
steering when showing homes.
To stop these acts of discrimination from taking place, government
agencies and advocacy groups have conducted paired testing
experiments where they send two subjects, one White and the other a
person of color, to act as potential buyers or renters for a home.
I've had agents call me colored, and this is in New York.
I've had agents invoke burning crosses to dissuade me from buying a
home in certain areas. Experiences can vary.
For the most part, you do not know.
But I have had some experiences where the treatment was so blatant
that you just sort of have to maintain your poker face.
Don't encourage or or dissuade them from continuing and just try to go
about acquiring the information.
In situations where acts of housing discrimination weren't as blatant,
Carter says he would later find out that an agent told him a property
was no longer available when it really was, or that an agent didn't
return his call about a property on the market, but returned the call
of a White tester inquiring about the same home.
Recently, the federal government proposed rollbacks on fair housing
policies. In July of 2020, President Trump tweeted that he's
rescinding the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act, an act
passed by the Obama administration to further the protections of the
1968 Fair Housing Act.
In response to the federal government's position on housing
discrimination, experts say state officials need to step up to
enforce stricter fair housing laws.
We've been seeing more people filing with state agencies or going to
the state courts in order to exercise their rights under the law.
We've been seeing some attorneys general stepping up to the plate to
exercise their state's fair housing laws.
While states work to uphold fair housing laws, real estate experts
recommend that potential first-time homebuyers look to grant programs
and financial resources that will make homeownership more accessible.
Homeownership is the #1 way for families and individuals to build
wealth in the United States.
Now, it's not the only way, but it is the #1 way, and I don't see
anything on the horizon changing that paradigm.
So we have to make sure that communities of color have access to
homeownership opportunities.
And for Black homeowners wanting to stay in gentrifying
neighborhoods, Parker's aunt, a homeowner in Bed-Stuy, says
collective action is the only way forward.
If three young couples buy a three-family, guess what?
They could afford it. But you know what?
We have to learn how to live with each other.
That's the key, okay?
And guess what?
What's happening in the world right now is making us live together.
Live together, actually. Okay?