ABSTRACT
As demonstrated throughout this chapter, nearly 100 years of discriminatory housing practices and policies on the part of local municipalities, homeowners, builders, banks, and federal agencies has created a social dynamic in which residential segregation by race and ethnicity have become a permanent feature of social arrangements in the United States. The beneficiaries of this social arrangement have been given a significant structural advantage in access to society’s rewards and privileges, which include quality housing, education, health care, employment, and wealth-building opportunities. Moreover, beneficiaries have been able to accumulate home equity and household wealth for transfer through successive generations, an opportunity denied to nonbeneficiaries. Even with the policy efforts to remedy past discriminatory practices and policies, household income and wealth inequalities between the beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries remain as wide, and in some cases, wider than 50 years ago.
