Home ownership is a major contributing factor to the racial wealth gap, as Demos, a left-of-center think tank, previously argued in a 2015 report. Seventy-three percent of white households own their home, Demos found; in sharp contrast, home ownership drops to 45 percent among black households. Demos also documented a racial gap in home equities — a median of $86,800 for white households and $50,000 for black households — in addition to discrepancies in neighborhood values. Decades of discriminatory housing policies produced these figures; explicit bias, in other words, as manifested by redlining and segregation.
