Page 27 - Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality

residents) earn less than White workers, but even for White residents there is a growing divide between the working class and the wealthy . Structural reform benefitting these diverse residents comes slowly, if at all, and presents a daunting challenge to those desiring fair and equal housing opportunity . Elsewhere I have detailed a blueprint for achieving housing equity for the working class, particularly low-wage workers .23 Encompassing educational initiatives, job creation, and living-wage reform, and accomplished through interracial and ethnic coalitions that forge antipoverty alliances among voters in lower economic classes, structural reform is vital to restore the luster and feasibility of the American dream of homeownership .24 Failing that, more U .S . residents will occupy the serf class of tenants beholden to the dictates of wealthy landowners, with subprime lending in retrospect the closest grasp of many to the brass ring of homeownership that ultimately came up empty . •
23 See Bender, Tierra y liBerTad (suggesting reforms for Latina/os and other groups).
24 Critiques of the value of homeownership include A. Mechele Dickerson, The Myth of Home Ownership and Why Home Ownership Is Not Always a Good Thing, 84 ind. l. rev. 189 (2009); Dorothy Brown, How Home Ownership Keeps Blacks Poorer Than Whites, ForBes (dec. 10, 2012), http://www.forbes.com/sites/ forbesleadershipforum/2012/12/10/how-home-ownership-keeps-blacks-poorer-than-whites/ (confronting the lack of appreciation in values in segregated Black neighborhoods, in contrast to majority White neighborhoods and the benefits of the stock market, the province of Whites). An affordability crisis exists too for rents, such as revealed in a New York University Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy 2012 report that concluded that, between 2007 and 2011, New York City’s median household income decreased by 6.8 percent while its rents rose 8.6 percent. Meredith Bennett-Smith, New York City, Income Inequality Capital of America, Now Facing Soaring Rent Prices: Report, huffingTon posT (July 31, 2013), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/30/new-york-income- inequality-rent_n_3678746.html?utm_hp_ref=new-york.
Housing and Community
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