Neighborhood wealth thresholds can legally replicate the racial targeting of 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. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1298

Categorization

• XREF: A wealth-proxy workaround for a race-based aim — connects to the legal crafting of race-conscious remedies generally, and to Brown’s claim that wealth is a standard benefit-gating metric.