The Legacy of Advantage: Multigenerational Home Wealth Transmission

Catalina Anampa Castro, University of Michigan

A house is the single largest asset owned by most Americans (Wolff 2016). However, the legacies of redlining and racial segregation mean that many families racialized as Black were unable to accumulate substantial housing equity over the course of the late 20th Century (Kuhn and Rìos-Rull 2015). Through using population-level research and historical panel data, I will illuminate institutions and mechanisms in the United States that sustain racial capitalism across space and generations and document its consequences for wealth inequality. My paper answers two questions: (1) Geographically, what did the distribution of housing wealth after the New Deal implementation look like? (2) How does the housing wealth mobility of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of men alive in 1940 contribute to racial differences in wealth inequality?

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 Presented in Session 87. Racial Capitalism & the Making of Class