Homeownership

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the household balance sheet, cash and payments, higher education, housing, and public benefits.

A new study out today from Brandeis University’s Institute for Assets and Social Policy (IASP) shows that the wealth gap between black and white Americans has roughly tripled since the 1980s. Let that sink in for a moment. In 1984, the gap in median wealth between black and white Americans amounted to roughly $85,000. (Remember that wealth is a measure of everything a person owns, minus what they owe. This figure represents the gap, rather than total holdings of either group.) By 2009, the black-white wealth gap had soared to $236,500. To put that in perspective, the median price of a house in 2009 was $216,700, according to Census figures.

As Michael Fletcher writes for the Washington Post, we’ve seen important progress toward racial equality over the past quarter century or so: more black Americans are graduating from college and entering into positions of public office, for example. But despite these markers of progress in place, the racial wealth gap is persistent and widening.

As the Wall Street Journal explains, the IASP study makes an important contribution to answering why this is so. By studying a large set of households over a 25 year period, IASP researchers can show which factors contribute most to the gap.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include housing and homeownership, savings and debt, consumer protection, and inequality.

The Center for American Progress hosted an event last Friday to look at the potential for low down-payment mortgages to create safe(r) homeownership opportunities for lower and middle-income Americans. While homeownership has been a primary asset building tool for many American families over the years, the need for a sizable down-payment has presented an obstacle for many lower-income, lower net worth families. In the post-Recession era especially, many Americans are struggling to finance a first home purchase. A panel of mortgage and housing experts took a look at the potential for low down-payments to facilitate homeownership for more people in the coming years. Joe Valenti, director of asset building for Center for American Progress, moderated.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include jobs and unemployment, homelessness, education, and payday lending.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include inequality, the safety net, and self-sufficiency.

Two reports released last week take a look at the issue of access to credit and preserving homeownership as a cornerstone of asset building in the wake of the recession. The foreclosure crisis had a particularly devastating impact on low-income families and communities of color, resulting in a significant widening of the racial wealth gap. These new reports seek to outline some key considerations for ensuring that homeownership remains a feasible goal for all families—and in particular for those that were hit hardest by the housing collapse.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include jobs, retirement, debt, housing, and taxation related issues.

Historically, owning a home has been part of achieving the “American Dream.” This long-standing narrative posits that with enough hard work anyone in the U.S. can rise from modest beginnings to true economic stability often seen in the form of a stable job, a secure retirement, a comfortable place to live, and perhaps a nest egg to pass along to one's children. There are as many different versions of the "American Dream" as there are Americans, but it's fair to say financial stability in the form of homeownership is central to that vision for many people.

Is the pursuit of the American Dream through homeownership just an elaborate bait and switch? It’s understandable why many might now think so. The collapse of the housing bubble has particularly devastated minority families who, after generations of discrimination in housing and mortgage lending, at last got a home of their own, only to find that it destroyed what little wealth they had.