Advance Racial Equity in Every Dimension of New York City’s Housing Policy Institutional racism has shaped New York City’s housing environment and choices, contributing to segregated neighborhoods, concentrating poverty and denying wealth-building and educational opportunities to people of color. The next mayor’s housing plan must respond to this long and painful history. Housing discrimination, including redlining and real estate discrimination and steering, concentrated Black and Latinx people30 in underfunded neighborhoods, many of which were also decimated by highway construction and environmental contamination, and sometimes in the name of urban renewal.
Finally, discriminatory and predatory lending denied or stole the wealthbuilding opportunity of homeownership and extracted wealth from Black and Latinx people. A substantial racial wealth gap has resulted and grown between White and Black families. In 1984, White families’ median wealth exceeded Black families’ wealth by 12 times and Latinx families’ wealth by 8 times; after the financial crash, White families’ median wealth grew to exceed Black families’ 20 times and Latinx families’ 18 times.33
JOIN THE CONVERSATION | #U4HOUSING
Job discrimination trapped Black and Latinx New Yorkers in low income jobs or denied them employment altogether. Meanwhile a racist criminal justice system has disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated Black Americans. These two factors have resulted in generational housing instability and contributed to disproportionate numbers of people of color in government programs like public housing31 and homeless shelters.32 And City, State, and federal actors have underfunded the city’s public housing, leaving their residents of color in housing with poor conditions and insufficient services.
23
