Wealth-based neighborhood targeting can legally redirect homeownership 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, The Whiteness of Wealth, 242

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth checking: does the constitutional argument about wealth-as-metric for benefits actually hold in homeownership subsidy context, or does it overclaim?
• XREF: connects to: Housing quality incentives depend on neighborhood character, demanding area-based planning — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 408