By Scott N. Markley, Taylor J. Hafley, Coleman A. Allums, Steven R. Holloway, and Hee Cheol Chung, Housing Matters, September 29, 2021

In the decade following the 2007–08 housing crash, the Black-white wealth gap expanded, largely because Black people experienced disproportionate foreclosures spurred by predatory and subprime loans. Homeownership plays a large role in wealth building, so many researchers and policymakers have focused on increasing Black homeownership rates to narrow the wealth gap. But others contend that the racism embedded in home price appreciation restricts the impact of homeownership in building Black wealth. In this study, the authors analyze how neighborhood racial and income characteristics structured home price appreciation from before the height of the housing boom to postcrisis recovery.

First, the researchers reviewed critical historical analyses of racial capitalism and property ownership in the United States to track the origin of material inequality between Black and white people. The authors posit that the “racial appreciation gap” is one way racial capitalism continues to govern wealth and homeownership in the United States.

With this frame, the researchers then modeled home price change using parcel-level repeat sales data for homes sold before the height of the housing boom (2000–03) and after the Great Recession (2014–16) in two counties within metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia. They selected Atlanta for three key reasons. First, the effects of the housing crisis (both subprime mortgages and foreclosures and postrecession recovery) are clearly racially uneven. Second, metro Atlanta is identified as a “high-appreciation metro” and has a large share of majority-Black census tracts (27.6 percent). Third, Atlanta has a longer history of Black homeownership, wealth accumulation, and economic inequality than many other regions and is commonly called an area of “Black opportunity.”

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