White families’ initial advantages compound through home equity far exceeding racial market averages

Evidence

Again, you don’t have to be a Brewster to benefit from these policies. In the life cycle of white wealth, sometimes a single gain leads to the next, and the next, and the next. Take Susan, who started out with a debt-free education and a connection to a stockbroker, and has built it into a multimillion-dollar portfolio. Or Kathy, another white Atlantan, who used an inheritance of 30,000 from her mother, plus a loan from her husband's brother, to buy a Manhattan apartment in the early 1990s. When she and her husband sold the apartment for a profit a few years later, they used the money to buy a larger home in less expensive Atlanta. That home, which is located in a largely white neighborhood, has seen its value multiply by a factor of six in the last two decades, from 146,700 in 2000 to 955,000 in 2019. Or Beth, a teacher-turned-consultant, who graduated from college debt-free and borrowed money from family to raise the down payment on a house in a different but still overwhelmingly white neighborhood, and has seen her home value multiply by a factor of seven. The house, valued at around 94,000 in 2000, was assessed at 667,600 in 2019. (The median home value in Atlanta is just under 300,000.) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 476

Categorization

• XREF: Atlanta white-neighborhood home appreciation of 6-7x versus median under $300K: concrete instance of the racial valuation gap in housing that several prior chapters (and the Trees infrastructure essay) gesture at.