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发帖数: 901 | 1 WASHINGTON — Millions of Americans suffered a loss of wealth during the
recession and the sluggish recovery that followed. But the last half-decade
has proved far worse for black and Hispanic families than for white families
, starkly widening the already large gulf in wealth between non-Hispanic
white Americans and most minority groups, according to a new study from the
Urban Institute.
“It was already dismal,” Darrick Hamilton, a professor at the New School
in New York, said of the wealth gap between black and white households. “It
got even worse.”
Given the dynamics of the housing recovery and the rebound in the stock
market, the wealth gap might still be growing, experts said, further dimming
the prospects for economic advancement for current and future generations
of Americans from minority groups.
The Urban Institute study found that the racial wealth gap yawned during the
recession, even as the income gap between white Americans and nonwhite
Americans remained stable. As of 2010, white families, on average, earned
about $2 for every $1 that black and Hispanic families earned, a ratio that
has remained roughly constant for the last 30 years. But when it comes to
wealth — as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement
accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances — white
families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession,
non-Hispanic white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as
nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal
Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy.
The dollar value of that gap has grown, as well. By the most recent data,
the average white family had about $632,000 in wealth, versus $98,000 for
black families and $110,000 for Hispanic families.
“The racial wealth gap is deeply rooted in our society,” said Caroline
Ratcliffe, one of the authors of the Urban Institute study. “It’s here, it
’s not going away, and we need to care about it.”
Many experts consider the wealth gap to be more pernicious than the income
gap, as it perpetuates from generation to generation and has a powerful
effect on economic security and mobility. Young black people are much less
likely than young white people to receive a large sum from their parents or
other relatives to pay for college, start a business or make a down payment
on a home, for instance. That, in turn, makes their wealth-building
prospects shakier as they move into adulthood.
Two major factors helped to widen this wealth gap in recent years. The first
is that the housing downturn hit black and Hispanic households harder than
it hit white households, in aggregate. Many young Hispanic families, for
instance, bought homes as the housing bubble was inflating and reaching its
peak, leaving them saddled with heavy debt burdens as house prices plunged
in places like suburban Phoenix and inland California.
Black families also were hit disproportionately by the housing collapse,
because heading into the recession housing constituted a higher proportion
of their wealth than for white families, leaving them more exposed when the
market crashed. Higher unemployment rates and lower incomes among blacks
left them less able to keep paying their mortgages and more likely to lose
their homes, experts said.
Discriminatory lending practices were also a factor. “We know that
communities of color, their rate of subprime or predatory loans was twice
what it is in the overall population,” said Tom Shapiro, the director of
the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.
Black families also suffered bigger hits to their retirement savings, the
Urban Institute found. On aggregate, the value of black families’
retirement accounts shrank 35 percent between 2007 and 2010, while white
families’ accounts actually gained 9 percent over the same period. With
lower earnings and higher unemployment rates leaving them with a thinner
safety net to begin with, black families were more likely to take funds out
of the market when it was depressed, leaving them out in the cold as the
market recovered.
“That reservoir of what you can dig into for emergencies and contingencies
is a lot shallower in communities of color,” Professor Shapiro said. “That
pushes black families to sling off assets, like I.R.A.’s or stocks, that
you might have had another goal in mind for.”
Something similar may be happening as the housing recovery takes hold. “
Some people talk about it in terms of a land grab,” said Professor Hamilton
of the New School, as mainly white investors are buying foreclosed homes
from disproportionately minority owners. “As the housing market starts to
appreciate, some of those minority buyers might not be back.”
All in all, Hispanic families lost 44 percent of their wealth between 2007
and 2010, the Urban Institute estimates, and black families lost 31 percent.
White families, by comparison, lost 11 percent of their wealth. The
economic turbulence worsened a gap that has persisted for as long as social
scientists have measured it, and has its roots in institutional racism, they
said, which, for instance, prevented black Americans from benefiting fully
from the G.I. Bill back in the 1940s and 1950s.
The Urban Institute study looked at mean wealth figures, where a small
number of high-net-worth families skews the averages upward. Median wealth
figures — where half of households have more wealth and half less —
produces lower numbers, but the trends are the same, the Urban Institute
researchers said.
Even if blacks and Hispanics make progress in the years ahead as the economy
improves, the persistence of the wealth gap has pushed many public policy
scholars to recommend the adoption of more ambitious programs to help reduce
worsening inequality.
The Urban Institute suggests reforming government policies that encourage
savings but disproportionately benefit the already wealthy and families with
high incomes, like the home mortgage interest deduction. Automatic savings
vehicles also might help lower-income and lower-wealth families start saving
, it said.
Professor Hamilton has proposed “baby bonds,” granting savings accounts to
infants, seeded with funds that allocate greater sums to families with less
wealth. (Such accounts would be race-blind, Professor Hamilton emphasized.)
Accountholders could tap that money as young adults, to pay for college or
start a business. “That’s really going to break the link of
intergenerational poverty, and the intergenerational wealth gap,” Professor
Hamilton argued.
But in the absence of such far-reaching measures, scholars and advocates
remain generally pessimistic that the wealth gap will narrow even as members
of minority groups increase their share of the American work force.
“The growth in the wealth divide is going to be very hard to close,” said
Dedrick Muhammad, the senior director of the economic department at the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the civil rights
organization. “I don’t have a positive feeling about racial wealth
inequality resolving itself with the recovery.” | x****o
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