Blog

Aug16

Groundbreaking Initiative Shows Pathway to Propel Black Homeownership

By Mike Community Journal Potential homebuyers turned out in droves to receive know-how, financial assistance through landmark program While statistics may paint a grim picture of Black homeownership, a recent event in Baltimore laid out a clear path for turning those numbers around across the country. Anyone questioning whether the Black community is primed to Continue Reading

Aug13

Library exhibit explores Southwest’s history of racial displacement

By Zach Farber Upstairs at the Linden Hills Library, a flat-screen television has been set up to serve as an interactive history exhibit. The screen displays an old hand-lettered, green-and-black map of Southwest Minneapolis. Scattered across the map are about a dozen big red dots, mostly clustered in the neighborhoods of Linden Hills and Lyndale. Continue Reading

Aug12

Bank of America Launches $5 Billion Home Loan Assistance Program

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Correspondent Bank of America officials have spent the past few months asking their customers and clients a simple question – what would you like to have the power to do? “For many, the goal is to own a home and saving up for a down payment is the biggest Continue Reading

Aug12

Five Key Facts That Underscore The Alarming Crisis In Black Homeownership

By Brenda Richardson For many black households, the housing crisis never ended. While 73.1% of white Americans owned homes as of the second quarter of 2019, a record low of 40.6% of black Americans had achieved homeownership and 46.6% of Hispanic Americans. The resulting 32.5 percentage-point gap in homeownership between black and white Americans is Continue Reading

Aug09

Systemic Inequality: Displacement, Exclusion, and Segregation

How America’s Housing System Undermines Wealth Building in Communities of Color By Danyelle Solomon, Connor Maxwell, and Abril Castro This report is part of a series on structural racism in the United States. Authors’ note: CAP uses “Black” and “African American” interchangeably throughout many of our products. We chose to capitalize “Black” in order to Continue Reading

Aug05

HUD to propose more hurdles to prove housing discrimination

By KATY O’DONNELL The Department of Housing and Urban Development is circulating a proposal to make it more difficult to bring discrimination claims under the Fair Housing Act. The update to HUD’s 2013 disparate impact rule would require plaintiffs to meet a five-step threshold to prove unintentional discrimination, replacing the current three-step “burden-shifting” approach. It Continue Reading

Aug05

Black Entrepreneur Who Opened Three Real Estate Firms in 5 Years Speaks at NAREB National Convention

Tamairo Moutry, a successful entrepreneur and real estate mastermind, has opened three real estate companies in less than 5 years, and is opening her next one in Illinois before the end of this year. She was a guest speaker on the Independent Real Estate Broker panel at this year’s NAREB national convention. Atlanta, GA — Continue Reading

Jul08

Survey finds race still a factor in mortgage approval

  A new analysis of US mortgage applications claims African Americans are twice as likely to be denied a mortgage as white applicants. The study, carried out by real estate blog Clever Real Estate, also found that the disparity between white and black mortgage approval rates is most pronounced in the South. In Montana, Idaho, Continue Reading

Jul08

Will White House act to end the affordable housing crisis?

By Charlene Crowell Nearly 90 years ago, Kelly Miller, a black sociologist and mathematician, said, “The Negro is up against the white man’s standard, without the white man’s opportunity.” As the first black man to enroll as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in 1908, Miller also authored a book entitled Race Adjustment, published Continue Reading

Jun19

Blacks, income property and wealth

By Pride Newsdesk It is quite disturbing to learn there has been virtually no substantial increase in Black wealth in the last 50 years.   Based on data from the Federal Reserve’s survey of Consumer Finance, the typical black family has just 10 cents for every dollar held by the typical white family. History reveals Continue Reading

Jun17

Making opportunity zones work for black communities

By Venroy July The IRS and the Treasury Department recently released a second set of proposed regulations on the federal Opportunity Zone program, which was created by the 2017 tax law to spur investment in economically distressed census tracts. The Opportunity Zone law provides significant long-term tax benefits for investors who put capital gains into Continue Reading

Jun12

Black Americans Face Challenges in Achieving Homeownership, but Help is Available

By: Crissinda Ponder Economic disparities are still a pain point in many communities across the United States, especially in terms of homeownership.   The homeownership rate among white Americans is 73.2%, according to the latest Residential Vacancies and Homeownership quarterly report from the U.S. Census Bureau — significantly higher than the homeownership rates for all Continue Reading

Jun10

REPORT: Cities with the highest percentage of black homeowners

By Selena Hill Even though housing discrimination has been outlawed for 50 years, studies show that the U.S. black homeownership rate isn’t any higher than when the Fair Housing Act initially passed in 1968. In fact, the racial gap between white and black homeowners today is significant. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the homeownership Continue Reading

Jun07

NAREB Takes Fight for Black Homeownership to Congressional Hearing

By Hazel Trice Edney The rate of Black homeownership in America – now at 41.1 percent, according to 2019 census numbers – is even lower than it was when the Fair Housing Act was signed into law 51 years ago on April 11, 1968. This means Black homeownership is 32.1 percentage points lower than that Continue Reading

Jun07

Examining Black Homeownership Trends

By Radhika Ojha Black Americans own a much smaller number of homes compared to other demographics across the nation’s 50 largest metros, according to a new study by LendingTree. The study, which focused on homeownership trends among African Americans revealed that while Americans who identified as Black made up around 15% of the population in Continue Reading

Jun06

New report reveals Black homeowners in Chicago lost billions due to predatory housing contracts

By Brianna Rhodes Many people in the Black community once used homeownership as a means of building wealth, but a report published on Thursday reveals that Black Chicagoans who purchased homes between 1950 and 1970 never had a chance of making money because of predatory housing practices. The report, called “The Plunder of Black Wealth Continue Reading

Jun05

‘A plunder of black wealth’: Predatory housing contracts gouged Chicago’s black homeowners, new report says

A report released Thursday is the first to put a dollar amount on how much wealth was extracted from Chicago’s black community in the 1950s and 60s through home sale contracts. By Carlos Ballesteros Black homebuyers in Chicago lost at least $3.2 billion in today’s dollars because of racist real estate policies and predatory contracts Continue Reading

May31

The legacy of Asheville’s racial real estate covenants

It’s rare that Drew Reisinger, Buncombe County’s register of deeds, is surprised by any historical outrages that turn up in the public records under his care. After all, it was at his direction that the county became the first one in the country to digitize its archives of deeds documenting the local ownership and sale Continue Reading

May29

NAREB Seeks to Increase Homeownership of Blacks by at Least Two Million

A national organization of real estate professionals has made the commitment to see the number of Black homeowners in the U.S. increase by two million in the coming years. The National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB), whose headquarters sits in Lanham, Md., is a membership organization with more than 18,000 real estate brokers, agents, Continue Reading

May28

Wilmington a ‘microcosm’ of larger cities on racial wealth divide, study says

By: Sophia Schmidt A vast divide in the amount of wealth accumulated by white families and families of color persists in the U.S.— and by some reports, has grown in the past few decades. That divide is reflected in Delaware’s largest city, where the median household income for black and Latino households is half that Continue Reading