Thread by @GeeDee215

this feels...familiar.

https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1300939997059493888

jokes aside...we're currently looking to buy a house. (it's not a situation i ever really figured i'd find myself in given where and how i grew up.) this process has only underlined how wrongheaded the idea is that creating more Black people homeowners might solve the wealth gap.

the appreciation in "value" of a house we saw listed in Neighborhood A (which like all of DC until recently was mostly/all Black but is now gentrifying) over just three years was equivalent to nearly a third of the *total* value of some of the homes we saw listed in SE.

SE, of course, remains v Black. It's marked by food deserts and transit deserts. The homeowners there aren't building wealth or capital; they're losing it. It is "worth" less and its "value" is less bc they are Black and their neighborhood is Black.

making it nominally easier for Black ppl to own homes might help some individual Black homeowners, but it won’t do anything to reduce the racial wealth gap since the housing economy is essentially the Racism Stock Market.

#housingsegregationineverything

npr.org/sections/codes…

if you give a white person something deemed valuable then later concede that maybe a Black person should have that same thing — but it's less valuable simply bc a Black person is holding it — what inequity is solved by more Negroes having that thing? the thing IS the inequity.

but we will keep talking about it like it's a solution because it's more or less what our politics currently allow.

nyti.ms/31TbXP3

part of why we keep talking about it this way is that there are all kinds of stakeholders in our current system of racial capitalism. Banks, brokers, etc.

but at some point we have to decide: is housing/shelter a human right or is it a commodity for speculation?

For all the above reasons, Homeownership programs can’t be “reparations.”

Reparations are reparations.

chicagotribune.com/suburbs/evanst…

Meanwhile.

https://twitter.com/thejasminebrand/status/1304115312414007296?s=20