And while that number has since been updated, the issue persists.
According to a 2022 estimate from the Urban Institute, Black residents had an average net worth of $11,000; for white residents, the average net worth was lower than the Fed’s estimate, yet still showed a 180 percent difference than Black people’s wealth.
So much of wealth is connected to owning a home, but in Boston, how much your house is worth is largely based on where you live and the color of your skin. Add to that the fact that you’re far less likely to even own your home if you’re Black or Latino; only 34 percent and 28 percent of Black and Latino families own their home, respectively, compared with 68 percent of white households.
Still, some will say this is a class problem, not a race problem. There are poor white people too, after all. Some will chalk it up to politics. Others will complain that the Globe makes everything about race.
This time, we are.
The Globe has launched a new team that will zero in on the racial wealth gap and what can be done to close it. The team, called Money, Power, Inequality, will explore the city’s history of inequities and trace the systems that allow them to persist. And we’ll look beyond Boston, to communities where prices are lower, but power imbalances still flourish.
We’ll investigate how decades-old institutional roadblocks still hinder upward mobility for people of color despite recent attempts to bridge the gap, such as financial assistance for first-time homebuyers and deed-restricted affordable housing. We’ll examine solutions that dare to pull people out of poverty, such as guaranteed basic income or student loan forgiveness.
And, perhaps most importantly, we’ll do this work in conjunction with the communities who have long been burdened by effects of the racial wealth gap.
We hope you will join us in this new effort. Visit the “Money, Power, Inequality” page to see our coverage in one place. And sign up for our weekly newsletter.
Kris Hooks can be reached at kris.hooks@globe.com. Follow him @Captain_Hooks.
