Inequality Within The United States Housing System: The Past and Present of Black Homeownership
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58445/rars.3845Keywords:
African American, homeownership, housing discrimination, wealth gap, systemic racism, redlining, modern housing, raceAbstract
This research project aimed to study how past historical discriminatory practices and policies contributed to modern housing inequality for African American homeowners. This was done through an organized methodology that allowed me to select sources with specialized criteria, examine source content for important evidence with a content analysis, and analyze the evidence within the sources using a Critical Race Theory framework. Analyzing the evidence collected from the sources revealed that redlining, government policy and action, and private policy and action were strong contributors to modern housing inequality for African American homeowners in the United States because it created structural disparities that affected African Americans’ ability to become a homeowner on the level of White homeowners.
References
Aaronson, Daniel, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar Mazumder. “The Effects of the 1930s HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, vol. 13, no. 4, 2021, pp. 355–392.
Asante-Muhammed, Dedrick, et al. “Federal Wealth-Building Policies Created & Continue to Drive the Racial Wealth Divide.” THE EVER-GROWING GAP: WITHOUT CHANGE, AMERICAN AND LATINO FAMILIES WON’T MATCH WHITE WEALTH FOR CENTURIES, Institute for Policy Studies, 2016, pp. 16–18. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep27369.8. Accessed 7 Nov. 2025.
Bullard, Robert D. “Environmental Justice in the 21st Century: Race Still Matters.” Phylon (1960-), vol. 49, no. 3/4, 2001, pp. 151–71. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3132626. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.
Bruce, Andrew A. “Racial Zoning by Private Contract.” The Virginia Law Register, new ser., vol. 13, no. 9, Jan. 1928, pp. 526–541. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1108328.
Chronopoulos, Themis. “African Americans, Gentrification, and Neoliberal Urbanization: The Case of Fort Greene, Brooklyn.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 20, no. 3/4, 2016, pp. 294–322. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44508182. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.
Duignan, Brian. "critical race theory". Encyclopedia Britannica, 26 Mar. 2026, https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-race-theory. Accessed 29 April 2026.
Egede, Leonard E et al. “Modern Day Consequences of Historic Redlining: Finding a Path Forward.” Journal of general internal medicine vol. 38,6 (2023): 1534-1537. doi:10.1007/s11606-023-08051-4
Herbold, Hilary. “Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the GI Bill.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 6, 1994, pp. 104–08. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2962479. Accessed 7 Nov. 2025.
Massey, Douglas S. “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 96, no. 2, 1990, pp. 329–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781105. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.
McGrew, Teron. “THE HISTORY OF RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND TITLE VIII.” The Black Scholar, vol. 27, no. 2, 1997, pp. 22–30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41068728. Accessed 21 Nov. 2025.
O’Neil, Meghan M. “Housing Policy, Race, Inequality, and Disparate Impact.” Phylon (1960-), vol. 55, no. 1 & 2, 2018, pp. 60–92. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26545019. Accessed 21 Nov. 2025.
Reid, Carolina. “Structural Racism in Housing Finance: Understanding the System to Change the System.” Racial Justice in Housing Finance: A Series on New Directions, Poverty & Race Research Action Council, 2021, pp. 7–34. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep32132.4. Accessed 21 Nov. 2025.
Rein, Marcy. “Segregation Shaped the San Mateo Housing Crisis.” Race, Poverty & the Environment, vol. 20, no. 2, 2015, https://www.reimaginerpe.org/20-2/rein/san-mateo-segregation.Accessed 24 Apr. 2026.
Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing, 2017. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.
Shapiro, Thomas, Tatjana Meschede, and Sam Osoro. The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide. Institute on Assets and Social Policy, Brandeis University, Feb. 2013.
University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab. Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining — Chicago, Los Angeles, The Bronx. University of Richmond, 2018, https://dsl.richmond.edu/socialvulnerability/.
Wilson, Virginia. “Research Methods: Content Analysis.” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, vol. 11, no. 1, 2016, pp. 41–43. https://doi.org/10.18438/B8CG9D.
Young, Caitlin, et al. “Why Don’t Households of Color Achieve Homeownership on the Same Scale as White Households?” A Landscape Scan of Homeownership for Households of Color, Urban Institute, 2022, pp. 3–13. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep67665.5. Accessed 27 Oct. 2025.
Downloads
Posted
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Research Archive of Rising Scholars
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
