Mark Winston Griffith

The Homes of Black Folk: Middle Class at What Price?

As a Black homeowner, it would be hypocritical for me to question the value of homeownership. My grandmother, an immigrant and seamstress from Jamaica with no more than a primary school education, bought a brownstone in Crown Heights in the early fifties. That home was handed down to my father and then bought by my wife and me at a below market price. Today it is home to a fourth generation of Griffiths.

Two briefs by the Joint Center for Political and Economic studies discuss the cost of homeownership for Black people ever since homeownership began taking on mythical proportions in post-war America. Together these briefings trace the trajectory of homeownership policies and bank redlining, from the post depression days to the current subprime debacle in which foreclosures are resulting, in some instances, in net losses in homeownership.

Although these briefs help perpetuate the troubling narrative that owning a home makes you a better person - "Homeownership has been associated with the development of strong cognitive skills," one brief asserts - the cumulative result of these findings suggests that America hasn't moved far beyond the illusionary promise that there's forty acres and a mule waiting for all us good Negroes.

Dangling homeownership to historically disenfranchised people like its God's path to middle class bliss, does not a homeownership policy make. Maybe one day we'll get a President who isn't just trying to hawk the American dream, but actually establishes a set of policies that place as much emphasis on keeping a home as acquiring it.

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Posted at 12:22 AM, Nov 23, 2007 in Economic Opportunity
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