Equal opportunities for all entrepreneurs and home owners

Author: Todd Polite/BA-Director / Black business help club

As a local business owner and minister for a number of years, I’ve noticed the growing need for more young people to learn a skill. Our economy has endured a great demand of changes and each society suffering from lack of resources and equality for housing, loan approvals, hiring processes, and various other community assistance programs have had it’s share of major shortages. One article stated,

“In a 2019 article, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning public policy research organization, states that federal government actions and institutions played “a critical role” in the creation and endurance of racist housing policies.

The Great Depression, which led to the establishment of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the still operational Federal Housing Administration (FHA), prompted a “two-tier approach” to housing.

The latter promoted residential segregation, argues Michela Zonta, senior housing policy analyst with the Center for American Progress. It did so by shunning investments in city areas where people of color lived and by placing so-called restrictive covenants to keep middle-class neighborhoods white.

After the passage of the Housing Act of 1937, low-income public housing projects mushroomed in inner cities, replacing slums and consolidating “minority neighborhoods.” Major road construction and suburbanization further segregated American cities.

At the same time, black Americans as well as other citizens of color found it extremely hard to qualify for home loans, as the FHA and the Veterans Administration’s mortgage programs largely served only white applicants. Those discriminatory practices prevented people of color from accumulating wealth through homeownership.

“African American families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s and 50s, and even into the 1960s, by the Federal Housing Administration gained none of the equity appreciation that whites gained,” says historian and academic Richard Rothstein in the film Segregated by Design, which is based on his acclaimed book, The Color of Law.

Buying a home while being a person of color

Even after the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act, black Americans and other minorities have continued to experience housing inequalities.

In the first quarter of 2020, the Census Bureau reported that black households had the lowest homeownership rate at 44%, nearly 30 percentage points behind white households.  

In a report published this month, the Urban Institute cites multiple prior studies that show that if homeownership were racially equalized, the racial wealth gap would diminish.

“We also know that homeownership benefits accrue differently to white homeowners than to homeowners of color,” write Urban Institute’s Michael Neal and Alanna McCargo. “Some reasons for this are that black homeowners are more likely to cycle between homeownership and renting, which has implications for how much housing wealth they can build relative to white homeowners.

“In addition, black homeowners are more likely to take on more debt to purchase homes that are less expensive, becoming more leveraged than white homeowners, while Hispanic homeowners live in higher-cost markets, taking out debt with lower down payments and having higher debt-to-income ratios.” Cited

Seeing the evident divide amid the growing issues how do we educate all children to respect equality guidelines and make the necessary efforts to invest in one another? Though American policies present a world of Black and White, from Republican to Democratic party alliances to historical brain washing in American educational systems, we must develop our youth to build business relationships rather than create negative narratives of racial competitiveness.

Join us in our effort to give entrepreneurs who have experienced some form of racial injustice a chance to succeed. Stress related and corporate responsibility assessment and training requests, should be mailed to training@cmeet.org