Black Households Research Articles

Federally-assisted housing and blood lead levels in the United States, 1999-2016

Background/Aim: Despite declining blood lead levels (BLLs) in the US, lead exposure remains disproportionately high in older housing and for low-income and non-Hispanic Black households. Federal housing assistance is linked to lower BLLs among children, but has not been evaluated among all US residents and by program type. Methods: We used the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999-2016 data linked to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administrative records to identify HUD-assisted participants. We compared BLLs of those currently-assisted and those on the waitlist (will receive assistance within two years) using multivariable regressions for log-transformed and dichotomous (≥ 3 µg/dL) BLLs. We examined effect modification by program type (project-based: public and multifamily housing vs. housing choice vouchers) and race/ethnicity, and conducted subset analyses for women and children under 12. Results: Sociodemographic characteristics were similar in the currently-assisted and waitlist groups. BLL geometric means were 1.11 (SE: 1.03) and 1.41 (SE: 1.03), respectively (p<0.05). In adjusted models, HUD assistance was associated with 8% lower BLLs (95% CI: -13%, -2%). In stratified models, this association was stronger among project-based housing (-11%, 95% CI: -18%,-4%) compared to housing choice voucher (-5%, 95% CI: -12%, 2%) recipients. Non-Hispanic white participants experienced a stronger protective association (-16%, 95% CI: -25%, -6%) compared to Black participants (-3%, 95% CI: -10%, 5%) and Mexican-Americans (2%, 95% CI: -18%, 28%). The association was significant among women (-9%, 95% CI: -15%, -2%) but attenuated among children (-2%, 95% CI: -9%, 6%). Findings remained consistent for clinically-meaningful BLL cutoff ≥ 3 µg/dL. Conclusions: Housing assistance is an important social-structural determinant of health that can reduce residential environmental exposures through better quality housing, routine maintenance practices, and/or compliance with residential lead paint laws. Increasing access to affordable housing for very low-income households advances environmental health equity.

Food insecurity among African Americans in the United States: A scoping review.

In 2019, the estimated prevalence of food insecurity for Black non-Hispanic households was higher than the national average due to health disparities exacerbated by forms of racial discrimination. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black households have experienced higher rates of food insecurity when compared to other populations in the United States. The primary objectives of this review were to identify which risk factors have been investigated for an association with food insecurity, describe how food insecurity is measured across studies that have evaluated this outcome among African Americans, and determine which dimensions of food security (food accessibility, availability, and utilization) are captured by risk factors studied by authors. Food insecurity related studies were identified through a search of Google Scholar, PubMed, CINAHL Plus, MEDLINE®, PsycINFO, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, and Web of Science™ (Clarivate), on May 20, 2021. Eligible studies were primary research studies, with a concurrent comparison group, published in English between 1995 and 2021. Ninety-eight relevant studies were included for data charting with 37 unique measurement tools, 115 risk factors, and 93 possible consequences of food insecurity identified. Few studies examined factors linked to racial discrimination, behaviour, or risk factors that mapped to the food availability dimension of food security. Infrequently studied factors, such as lifetime racial discrimination, socioeconomic status (SES), and income insecurity need further investigation while frequently studied factors such as age, education, race/ethnicity, and gender need to be summarized using a systematic review approach so that risk factor impact can be better assessed. Risk factors linked to racial discrimination and food insecurity need to be better understood in order to minimize health disparities among African American adults during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Type of household firearm ownership and firearm suicide among adolescents, 1976–2018

After declining steadily for almost two decades, the rate of firearm suicide among adolescents (aged 15–19 years) has increased nearly every year since 2007. At the same time, overall levels of household firearm ownership have been declining. In this paper, we examined whether and how types of firearms in the homes of adolescents have changed over time, and the extent to which such changes are associated with trends in firearm suicides among adolescents. Our analyses focused on understanding these trends among Black and White male and female adolescents to better understand longstanding race-gender differences in firearm ownership and firearm suicide. With combined data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the findings show that handgun ownership in Black and White households increased over the last four decades, while overall levels of firearm ownership declined. Increases in handgun ownership were predictive of increased firearm suicide rates among White adolescents, especially among males. We found no significant relationship between firearm suicide among Black adolescents and firearm ownership among Black households, regardless of gun type, which is potentially unsurprising given that firearm ownership is substantially lower in Black households compared to White households. Possibly reflecting race and gender differences in household gun ownership, our findings also show that rates of firearm suicide were lower for Black and female adolescents and highest for White male adolescents. Taken together, these findings provide new evidence on the relationship between trends in firearm ownership and adolescent firearm suicide and address important questions about the influence of race and gender for understanding firearm suicide among adolescents.

Simplification of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Recertification Processes and Association With Uninterrupted Access to Benefits Among Participants With Young Children

In the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), families may temporarily lose benefits for which they are still eligible because of administrative issues. This lapse in benefits, referred to as churning, increases the risk of food insecurity for families, which is linked with poorer health. To examine the rate of churning among SNAP participants with young children and evaluate the association of administrative policy changes with churning risk. A cross-sectional study of recertifications among 9735 SNAP-participating households with at least 1 child younger than 6 years from May to November 2019 tested whether there were sociodemographic differences in churning risk. An interrupted time series analysis of recertifications among 70 799 households from January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2019, tested whether state-level administrative policy changes were associated with churning risk. Data were analyzed between February and November 2021. Three Massachusetts SNAP administrative policy changes. Churn episodes, defined as losing SNAP benefits after a deadline for eligibility recertification followed by receiving benefits again within 30 days, measured using state SNAP administrative data. In 2019, a total of 9752 recertification events occurred among 9735 households (3841 [39.4%] Hispanic, 2138 [21.9%] non-Hispanic Black, and 3533 [36.2%] White) with at least 1 child younger than 6 years participating in SNAP. Of these households, 3984 (40.9%) experienced SNAP churning for a period of 1 to 30 days because of missed recertification forms in any given month. Churning was more common among Hispanic households (by 3.9 percentage points; 95% CI, 1.2-6.6 percentage points) than non-Hispanic White households and more common among households with more than 1 child younger than 6 years (by 5.6 percentage points; 95% CI, 3.0-8.1 percentage points) compared with smaller households. Among households that churned, non-Hispanic White households lost a mean of $10.51 (95% CI, $10.16-$10.86) in benefits per household member, and non-Hispanic Black households lost an additional $1.10 (95% CI, $0.47-$1.74) per household member. On implementation of a task-based, first-available-caseworker model, mean churn episode length was significantly shorter immediately on introduction of the model (-0.30 days per each month after the policy change; 95% CI, -0.52 to -0.07 days) and over time (-0.23 days per each month after the policy change; 95% CI, -0.26 to -0.20 days). At the addition of a second policy change to expand participants' access to simplified reporting requirements, a decrease was seen in the trend in the probability of a churn episode by -0.74 percentage points per month (95% CI, -0.87 to -0.62 percentage points). A third policy to expand online services for submitting recertification paperwork was not associated with a change in churn risk over time. Churning in SNAP is common among households with young children and is disproportionately experienced by Black and Hispanic households and lower-income households. Administrative changes to simplify caseworkers' workloads and streamline eligibility reporting for participants may reduce churn.

State-Level Socioeconomic Racial Inequity and Food Insecurity in the U.S.

Racial inequities in food insecurity have been documented for the past 2 decades in the U.S., with the prevalence of food insecurity among Black households being 2-3 times higher than that among White households across time. The purpose of this study was to determine the association between socioeconomic indicators of structural racism at the state level and food insecurity among White and Black households in the U.S. This study is a secondary analysis of pooled, cross-sectional data from the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey, 2015-2019 (N=158,551 Black and White households). Data analysis occurred in 2021-2022. The outcome was household food insecurity, and the exposure was structural racism indicators, operationalized as state-level racial inequities in income, earnings, education, unemployment, and home ownership. Individual-, household-, and state-level sociodemographic covariates were included. Among Black households, state-level racial inequities in income, unemployment, and home ownership were associated with 34% (OR=1.34; 95% CI=1.05, 1.70), 14% (OR=1.14; 95% CI=1.02, 1.28), and 11% (OR=1.11; 95% CI=1.05, 1.16) higher odds of food insecurity, respectively. For White households, state-level racial inequities in income, education, unemployment, and home ownership were associated with 21% (OR=0.79; 95% CI=0.63, 0.98), 27% (OR=0.73; 95% CI=0.66, 0.85), 10% (OR=0.90; 95% CI=0.82, 0.98), and 8% (OR=0.92; 95% CI=0.89, 0.95) lower odds of food insecurity, respectively. Structural racism may be a key driver of food insecurity among Black households and may be protective against food insecurity among White households. Implementing policies addressing state-level racial inequity in socioeconomic indicators could be effective at reducing racial inequities in food insecurity.

Impact of Neighborhood Sociodemographic Characteristics on Food Store Accessibility in the United States Based on the 2020 US Census Data.

BackgroundIt has been previously reported that access to quality food is greatly impacted by neighborhood food store quality and availability, which in turn is determined by a complex interplay of sociodemographic factors. Low-income predominantly Black neighborhoods face the most limited access to quality food. The purpose of this study was to examine the newly available 2020 Census to see if any significant change has occurred to this pattern and if any new insights can be gained by analyzing these data.Methods2020 US Census and current ReferenceUSATM food store data were merged and multivariate Negative Binomial Count Regression Models were used to establish the relationship between different types of food stores (high, medium, and low quality) and neighborhood characteristics including urbanicity, poverty level, and race/ethnicity.Results11.5% of the predominantly Non-Hispanic (NH) White census tracts (CT) (6,486 out of 56,192), 61.3% (4,002 out of 6,531) of the predominantly Non-Hispanic Black CTs, and 44.1% (3,644 out of 8,258) of the predominantly Hispanic CTs were in the high poverty category. Compared to the reference group of NH White/low-poverty group, the incident rate ratio (IRR) and 95% Confidence interval [CI] of having access to high quality food stores for NH Black was significantly lower starting at the low poverty level (0.57 [0.48, 0.67], p<0.001) and decreasing further with increasing poverty: NH Black/medium poverty (0.48 [0.42, 0.55], p<0.001); NH Black/high poverty (0.38, [0.34, 0.42], p<0.001). A similar pattern was seen with the Hispanic groups as well, though to a lesser degree. We further examined access to computer/electronic devices including smartphones from 2017 to 2020. High poverty NH Black households experienced the fastest growth from 73.6% access rate in 2017 to 82.6% in 2020, compared with 87.0% to 92.0% in the total population.ConclusionAnalyses of the 2020 Census data reveal that access to high-quality food stores in high-poverty minority neighborhoods, NH Black neighborhoods in particular, remains severely limited. Innovative interventions and emerging technologies, online grocery shopping for example, warrant further evaluation as potential strategies to improve access and decrease disparities in social determinants of healthy eating.

The Expected, Perceived, and Realized Inflation of US Households Before and During the COVID19 Pandemic

Using matched micro-data on the spending of households and their macroeconomic expectations, we study the link between the realized inflation of households in their daily shopping and their perceived and expected levels of inflation both before and during the pandemic. As the pandemic spread across the USA, disagreement among US households about inflation expectations surged along with the average perceived and expected level of inflation. Simultaneously, realized inflation at the household level became more dispersed. During the pandemic, low income, low education, and Black households experienced a larger increase in realized inflation than other households. Dispersion in realized and perceived inflation explains a large share of the rise in dispersion in inflation expectations. Finally, households jointly revised their inflation and unemployment expectations during the pandemic, consistent with a supply-side view of the pandemic.

1508-PUB: Food Insecurity in Rural Communities Before and During the COVID-Pandemic

Introduction: In times of economic crisis, there have been sharp increases in levels of food insecurity. During the COVID-pandemic, the USDA reported that food insecurity remained stable at 15% in America from 20to 2020. This national average may not reflect the heightened risk of rural areas and counties with known socioeconomic disadvantages. Objective: To evaluate food insecurity in a rural county with documented poor health outcomes and assess the impact of the COVID-pandemic. Methods: We performed a cross-sectional survey of all households in Sullivan County, a rural county that has the second-worst health outcomes among all counties in New York State. The survey included two screening questions that have been validated to identify households with food insecurity. The questions were asked in reference to 2019, before the pandemic, and for 2020, during the pandemic. Respondents were also asked to fill out household and demographic questions. To help mitigate non-response bias, statistical raking was performed using age, sex, race/ethnicity, and health insurance strata. We also performed geospatial analysis within the county to identify significant clusters of food insecurity. Results: Of 4,725 survey responses analyzed, 26% of households reported food insecurity in 2019, which increased to 35% in 2020. We identified high levels of food insecurity in 58% of Black households and 58% of Hispanic households in 2020. Food insecurity in 2020 was also present in 58% of unmarried households with children and in 64% of households insured by Medicaid. Nearest neighbor analyses revealed that hotspots of food insecurity were primarily located in or near urban clusters within this rural county. Conclusion: Our countywide health survey of a particularly at-risk rural county identified significant increases in food insecurity during the COVID-pandemic. Economic responses to future pandemics may need to focus on bolstering food security among single households with children and those insured by Medicaid. Disclosure C.Quintero arias: None. B.Elbel: None. N.A.Mcgraw: None. D.C.Lee: None. M.Rony: None. E.Jensen: None. R.Patel: None. S.O'callaghan: None. C.A.Koziatek: None. K.Doran: None. R.Anthopolos: None. L.Thorpe: None. Funding National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (R01DK124400)

The Contribution of Shareholder Primacy to the Racial Wealth Gap

The US racial wealth gap is substantial and growing, stemming from a history of structural racism and the intergenerational transmission of wealth. This article investigates the role of corporate equity and mutual fund ownership on the racial wealth gap over time. 92.1 percent of US corporate equity and mutual fund value is owned by white households; Black households own 1.5 percent while Hispanic households own 1.9 percent. I use the Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts to determine the changing impact of the corporate equity gap on the racial wealth gap, and to measure how shareholder payments—dividends and stock buybacks—are divided by race and ethnicity. I find that total shareholder payments made to white households during that time frame totaled $13 trillion, while $181 billion went to Black households and $212 billion to Hispanic households. I then find that the proportion of the gap in corporate equity and mutual fund ownership to the overall racial wealth gap has grown over the past three decades, from 10 percent to 23 percent. This analysis contributes to policy discussions about ending shareholder primacy and wealth inequities that are a legacy of the US's history of slavery, racism, and xenophobia.

Media Access and Consumption in the Civil Rights Era

This paper uses the 1960 census and contemporary individual survey data to document the media landscape during the American civil rights movement. I find that southern Black households' TV ownership was much lower than those of other groups in the nation. Southern Black adults also consumed less TV, newspapers, and magazines on average than their White counterparts. In comparison, radio was the most popular medium among Black Southerners and was widely consumed across socioeconomic classes within the Black community. The findings underscore the unique and strong relationship between radio and the Southern Black community during the civil rights era.

Segregation and the Initial Provision of Water in the United States

US cities invested heavily in water and sewer infrastructure throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These investments improved public health and quality of life by helping US cities control typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases. We show that segregated cities invested in water infrastructure earlier but were slower to reach universal access and slower to eliminate typhoid fever. We develop a theoretical model that illustrates how segregation, by facilitating the exclusion of Black households from water and sewer systems, explains these seemingly paradoxical findings.

The Saving Behavior of Heterogeneous Households and Credit Constraints: A Decomposition

This paper sheds light on how saving decisions respond to credit constraints. In this paper, we examine the role credit constraints play in the savings decisions of households by focusing on a well-defined set of reasons for their savings. To do so, we classify the saving motives as precautionary saving, saving to finance investments, and saving for retirement. We find that credit-constrained households are less likely to save for retirement and liquidity, while they are more likely to save for investment purposes. Constrained Black households are more likely to save for in- vestment purposes. Discouraged households are more likely to save for investment and less likely to save for retirement purposes. When households are credit-constrained, they use their savings to smooth their consumption rather than to accumulate wealth over time.

Interfamily Financial Dependence and Retirement Savings

This study analyzes the hypothesis that retirement savings differ by race and ethnicity partially because households of color are more likely than white households to provide informal financial support to financially fragile relatives and friends. The authors use a unique combination of the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey from August 2020 to December 2021 and the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances from 2010 to 2019 to study retirement wealth, 401(k) plan participation, 401(k) account contributions, and preretirement liquidity between households that give and don’t give informal financial support by race and ethnicity. They provide both summary statistics and some illustrative multivariate regression results for the relevant correlations, and conclude that informal financial support poses financial risks. Households provide such support during financial emergencies; it is widespread and occurs frequently over the life course. Many households of color save more for retirement when providing informal financial support, although this is not the case for white households. Preretirement liquidity in the form of 401(k) loans is also greater among Black households than among white households. Black households show greater saving efforts than white households while providing informal financial support but do not see systematically larger account balances. This suggests that higher preretirement liquidity could offset the additional contributions. In this way, households of color that provide informal financial support to friends and relatives are running faster to stay in place with regard to their own retirement savings.

How architectural principles can help conceptualize and analyze breakups among intergenerational households

Guided by two architectural design principles, we investigated whether differences in the ways intergenerational households were structured could predict the odds of intergenerational households breaking apart. The two architectural design principles guiding our study were: (a) to classify structures, such as intergenerational households, according to a hierarchical ordering, in our case, a generational hierarchy, first, second, third, and so forth); and (b) to identify a central entity or focal point responsible for maintaining the structure, again for us, the focal generation responsible for a household. Applying both principles to a rich source of data that contained a large sample of intergenerational households, we found striking differences in odds of breakups by generational ordering, focal generation, and race. Whereas white three-generation households headed by grandparents were the most likely to break up, black skipped-generation households headed by grandparents were the least likely to break up.

Monetary Policy and Racial Inequality

This paper aims at an improved understanding of the relationship between monetary policy and racial inequality. We investigate the distributional effects of monetary policy in a unified framework, linking monetary policy shocks both to earnings and wealth differentials between Black and white households. Specifically, we show that, although an accommodative monetary policy shock increases employment for Black households more than for white households, the overall effects on earnings are small. At the same time, an accommodative monetary policy shock has large effects on the wealth difference between Black and white households, because Black households own fewer assets that appreciate in value. This suggests an important trade-off if policymakers aim to reduce racial inequalities.

Historical Trauma: Past Pains Must Lead To Future Promise

Historical Trauma: Past Pains Must Lead To Future Promise [1] Karsonya Wise Whitehead (bio) As someone who grew up in Jim Crow South Carolina, my father likes to call himself a survivor. He has looked white supremacy and racial hatred in the eye, and though he has not won, he wants to note that he has not lost, not yet. When I was in college, I asked him why he was convinced that he had not won. He said that winning, for Black folks, would only come when we could walk anywhere in this country and not be concerned that the color of our skin could mean the end of our life. My father remembers the days of being called “boy” even though he was a man, of being dismissed and overlooked even when he followed the rules, and of hearing his mother cry when she realized that he had decided to fight back and not give way. Those types of decisions, he would say, are best made once you realize that you are willing to die to be free rather than live in fear under the thumb of whiteness. My father’s family carried pistols and shotguns whenever they rode into town. My grandfather used to sit on a pillow, and his pistol would be underneath, on the right side, in case he needed to grab it in a hurry. His sons, my father’s brothers, would have shotguns on the floor near their feet. Nobody ever said it, but everybody knew that if the Klan confronted them, they were prepared to meet their Maker, standing up and fighting back. Such was the reality of living in a Southern county where performative whiteness manifested itself through the law and daily acts of random domestic terror against Black people. It was not unusual for Black women to have a kaffeeklatsch, sharing horrific tales of lynchings and cross burnings over sweet potato pie and integrated coffee. It was not uncommon for Black households to keep an open Bible on the coffee table and a loaded shotgun at the door. My grandmother, my father’s mother, knew how to shoot. She knew how to steady her shoulder and [End Page 8] set her arm so that her hands never wavered. She grew up on a farm, way down South, so she knew how to pick cotton, twist off a chicken’s head, and grab her shotgun, look white terror in the eye, and not look away. My father once told me that he learned that the best time to plant a tree was fifty years ago, and his mother taught him that the best time to decide to fight against whiteness was five minutes before the Klan showed up. Such decisions, he would say, must be made before you see the white sheets out your front window. My father was twelve years old when they murdered Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. He remembers how his mother and all of the women at the church were weeping and wailing during Sunday church service. What kind of men, the pastor intoned, could look a boy in the eye and then torture him to death? How much effort would it take for us to love the hell out of white people’s hearts and minds? My dad said the murder of Emmett Till changed everything. After that, Black boys were taught by their parents, who wanted to keep them alive, not to look white women in the eye, not to speak first, and not to be too excited once you spoke. It was the act of bearing witness to his friends learning how to give way that strengthened my father’s resolve to fight. If he was going to die at the hands of whiteness, he told me, he was prepared to do it standing up, with his shotgun in his hand, and a steely resolve in his eye. The summer before they heard about Emmett Till, my father said my grandmother used to sing a song around the house when she was cleaning up. He said she kept her voice real low, but sometimes when she thought she was alone, she would sing loud...

The reemergence of land contracts in Chicago: Racialized class-monopoly rent as a recursive objective in capitalist property markets

The practice of selling homes on contract—typically on onerous terms and comparatively riskier for the buyer than traditional mortgage financing—was commonplace in the US postwar era when Black households were systematically cut off from mainstream mortgage financing. Assumed to be relegated to an era of de jure segregation after the passage of fair housing legislation, contract selling has reemerged since 2008. By forensically recreating the ownership and financing histories for 515 properties in Cook County, Illinois that were sold on contract between 2011 and 2015 and a close reading of recorded land contracts, the paper connects these properties to the foreclosure crisis after 2008, and to two earlier periods of subprime lending, in the early 2000s and late 1990s. The paper uses this historical property analysis to deepen understanding of class-monopoly rent as a recursive capitalist objective within racialized property markets. In the simplest terms, class-monopoly rent is the portion of rent that owners secure through establishing and maintaining barriers to access to property. The paper describes three processes that produce racialized class-monopoly markets. First, the continued production of “group-differentiated vulnerability” to precarious housing is a premise and a product of the process of racialized uneven development. Second, the role of the state in the management of financial risk intensifies risks for communities made vulnerable by previous rounds of racial and class dispossession. Third, these two processes structure urban space so that the land contract serves as a tractable legal tool in creating and consolidating racialized class-monopoly market spaces. The result is the proliferation of racially-contingent forms of unstable housing tenure.

The Online Ordering Behaviors among Participants in the Oklahoma Women, Infants, and Children Program: A Cross-Sectional Analysis.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a nutrition assistance program in the United States (U.S.). Participants in the program redeem their prescribed food benefits in WIC-authorized grocery stores. Online ordering is an innovative method being pilot-tested in some stores to facilitate WIC participants’ food benefit redemption, which has become especially important in the COVID-19 pandemic. The present research aimed to examine the online ordering (OO) behaviors among 726 WIC households who adopted WIC OO in a grocery chain, XYZ (anonymous) store, in Oklahoma (OK). These households represented approximately 5% of WIC households who redeemed WIC benefits in XYZ stores during the study period, which was 1 July to 31 December 2020. This period was during the COVID-19 pandemic but after the temporary lockdown in Oklahoma had been lifted. Descriptive statistics were estimated for WIC OO households’ adoption behaviors and their orders. The Cox proportional hazard model and zero-truncated negative binomial regression were applied to examine the relationship between participants’ socio-demographics and the length of time between 1 July 2020, and their first OO, as well as the number of WIC online orders. About 80% of these online orders were picked up without any changes. Minority households had a significantly longer time before adopting their first OO (hazard ratio (HR) < 1, p < 0.001), while households with a child or a woman participant, or more participants, had a shorter time before adopting OO (HR > 1, p < 0.05). Non-Hispanic black households had a fewer number of OOs than non-Hispanic white households (B = −0.374, p = 0.007). OO adoption varied across socio-demographics. More efforts are needed to ensure equal access and adoption of WIC OO.

Heterogenous Rates of Return on Homes and Other Real Estate: Do the Rich Do Better? Do Black Households Do Worse?

Heterogenous Rates of Return on Homes and Other Real Estate: Do the Rich Do Better? Do Black Households Do Worse?

Subsidizing Interest Rates to Bridge the Racial Wealth Gap

There is a large, persistent, and worsening wealth gap between Black and White households in the United States. Black families’ median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families (Bhutta et al. 2020). New research shows current monetary policies designed to aid in the economic recovery from the COVID-19 recession will likely exacerbate this wealth gap (Bartscher et al. 2021, 33). This paper proposes issuing a government-subsidized two percent mortgage interest rate reduction for prospective Black homebuyers to provide a financial incentive for Black households to build wealth and to promote integrative behavior among neighborhoods.