According to a Federal Reserve report from 2016, the average homeowner that year had a household wealth of $231,400, compared to the average renter who had a household wealth of just $5,200, which means the average net worth of a homeowner is over 44 times greater than someone who rents!
Real estate tends to go up in value over the long term, so owning property is one of the best ways for the average family to build generational wealth but that opportunity hasn’t always been equal in this country.
The following report from NPR is worth a listen and discusses why the homeownership gap between white and black Americans is larger today than it was over 50 years ago when housing discrimination was still legal:
For over a century, structural forces both from the government and the real estate industry have denied black Americans a fair shot at the American dream of home ownership. You can’t have hundreds of years of oppression and then decades of legal housing discrimination and then declare everything has been fixed when the government outlaws racism in the housing market and then expect that the history, legacy and impact of those policies and practices to disappear overnight, or to even be fixed within a generation.
There are structural and systemic reasons why certain groups of people don’t tend to have generational wealth and until the wealth gap between black and white families considerably shrinks, I believe this country needs to have policies in place to try to rectify these disparities.
