Black homebuyers achieve higher appreciation only by buying into predominantly white neighborhoods.

Evidence

This is why homeownership is not a straightforward wealth builder for black families: because the only guaranteed return on their investment is to buy in a community where they will be a small and vulnerable minority. A recent study of fifteen cities between 2012 and 2017 showed that the black Americans in the study had higher estimated appreciation (38 percent versus 30 percent) than their white counterparts because “the majority of Black buyers…purchased homes in neighborhoods that are not majority Black.” Instead, they chose neighborhoods where the percentage of black residents ranged from 7 percent to 34 percent. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ADDENDUM article about trees and also broadly to structural-racism-in-housing scholarship; more directly it echoes the reader’s reading purpose on how facially neutral mechanisms produce racialized outcomes.