Neighborhood wealth thresholds can legally proxy for race in subsidies

Evidence

What would be allowed is to tie all homeownership subsidies to neighborhoods and neighborhood wealth. If you compare neighborhood median wealth to citywide median wealth, you could legally create subsidies that exclusively go to homebuyers in neighborhoods below the citywide median. As part of a neighborhood-based subsidy policy, we could also tie in deductions for home-sale losses in these neighborhoods. Wealth, as we will see in chapter 6, is a typical metric for limiting access to government benefits, so this fix would be unlikely to face serious constitutional challenges. … The racial wealth gap means that my proposal will likely apply to the majority of black homeowners who live in racially diverse neighborhoods, as well as to the residents of some all-white neighborhoods in poorer rural areas. From my perspective, that makes the neighborhood-based subsidy a less than ideal solution, but it’s potentially the most politically and legally viable. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 242

What would be allowed is to tie all homeownership subsidies to neighborhoods and neighborhood wealth. If you compare neighborhood median wealth to citywide median wealth, you could legally create subsidies that exclusively go to homebuyers in neighborhoods below the citywide median. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1298

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘wealth as race proxy’ move that dodges scrutiny is the exact obverse of the conduit the reader’s broader thread on structural racism as mechanism depends on naming.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 242; Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 1298