Black homeownership rose ten points despite being denied FHA insurance

Evidence

FHA insurance can be credited for the significant growth in white homeownership rates, with a majority of white Americans (57 percent) owning homes by 1950. Just ten years earlier, only 46 percent of white Americans had been homeowners. Despite being denied access to FHA insurance, homeownership among black Americans increased from 23 to 34 percent during that same period. They bought homes with costlier mortgages and navigated racially restrictive covenants, yet somehow they still increased their homeownership rate by 10 percentage points—similar to their white peers, but without the preferential treatment. And by 1950, black Americans were paying income taxes to a federal government that continued to deny them equal access to government services like VA benefits and FHA-insured mortgages, since racial discrimination in housing was still 100 percent legal. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 372

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the ‘double taxation without representation’ style claim that blacks paid into a system that denied them its services — connects to reparations-as-accounting framing from Whiteness of Wealth chapter on government benefits.
• SEED: ‘Somehow they still made progress without the subsidy’ is a strong counter to the objection that Black disadvantage is purely cultural; black gains despite structural barriers parallel what post-FHA white gains cost-free.