Postwar FHA subsidies boosted white but not black homeownership, despite black tax contributions.

Evidence

My parents were put in a position to build wealth through homeownership because of exceptional circumstances. Most black Americans at the time could not tell the same story. In the middle of the last century, white homeownership was sped along by governmental tailwinds that increased the rate from less than half (45.7 percent) in 1940 to almost two-thirds (64 percent) by 1960. (Before the government provided subsidies through the Federal Housing Administration, most white Americans rented.) The black homeownership rate also increased during this time, from 22.8 percent to 38.4 percent, but black Americans largely did it without the subsidies enjoyed by whites, even as their taxpayer dollars helped pay for those subsidies. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 171

Categorization

• XREF: Directly ties to Rothstein’s The Color of Law and supports the reading goal’s structural-racism-as-mechanism thesis.