Present tax policy perpetuates the housing wealth gap that past covenants created

Evidence

It’s widely acknowledged today that past policies like those covenants left black American families behind when it comes to homeownership and its role in generational wealth building. Less known is the fact that present-day tax policy helps keep them there. Federal tax subsidies make things better for most white Americans, who’ve been reaping market and governmental rewards for more than half a century, and worse for most black Americans, whom the market and government have already punished. While white homebuyers no longer have a monopoly on receiving FHA subsidies, they still benefit from the anti-black preferences present in the real estate market, including when real estate brokers “steer” homeowners away from neighborhoods based on their race—exactly as the bad actors of HOLC and NAREB did when housing discrimination was legal. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1232

Categorization

• XREF: Connects housing segregation to the tax system analysis in Brown’s other work and to the saturated-system harm architecture; also links to the FHA/redlining history.