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Redfin Report: African Americans still face massive barriers to homeownership!
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wning a home is one of the greatest achievements on American soil! Owning a home has been linked to building intergenerational wealth but the American homeownership story is one marked by a legacy of discrimination where minorities are completely left out of the picture in the country of the free! Over the last decade, homeownership for African Americans has shown dramatic declines than it is for any other racial or ethnic group in the country. In fact, data shows that in 2020, the rate of Black homeownership was just 1.5% higher than it was in the 70s when the race was partly legal. Discrimination, especially in housing is a deeprooted legacy and what makes it worse is the fact that the government legalized it through its policies that were largely created to perpetuate private attitudes that date back to the days of slavery. The Federal government started to push for the expansion of homeownership in the New Deal Era 116
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through the innovations like the 30-year mortgage. While there is a lot of documentation regarding discrimination against Blacks and other minorities, I feel like we are not talking enough about redlining which was legal and done by a federal institution. Redlining labeled certain areas as high risk and therefore, applicants from those areas could not be given a loan. Did I mention that these were also the areas where most African Americans lived? It was even worse because the mortgage was denied to even the white folks who lived near the area. In fact, speaking at an interview about the 1968 Fair Housing Act with Eric Lawrence Frazier, The CEO and Founder of the Power Is Now Media, Craig Fergusson, the Vice President of the National Homebuyers Fund had this to say;
“...first of all the act was great but it was too late and I’m not sure enough was done and I’ll say this because everyone knows that the greatest form of creating wealth is homeownership… I mean if you go back to even the 1930s FHA wouldn’t insure homes for African-Americans they wouldn’t! They just refused FHA out of federal homeownership they just wouldn’t and they also wouldn’t insure homes to white neighborhoods that were close to black neighborhoods.” THE POWER IS NOW MAGAZINE | AUGUST 2021
