Housing costs and supply are dominating the news at the moment.  Housing is the highest monthly bill typical Americans face, reaching an average of $1674 a month in 2021. Housing prices have increased far faster than incomes (Miller 2015), making affordable homeownership inaccessible for many aspiri … Read more

Real estate ownership is one of the primary vehicles for wealth creation in the United States, and consequently one of the core drivers of the racial wealth gap after generations of disinvestment in and displacement of BIPOC communities. Andre Perry, senior fellow at Brookings Institution and author … Read more

In the early 1900s, an estimated 15 million acres of agricultural land in the U.S. was owned by African Americans. Just a fraction of that land – about 1.5 million acres – is still black-owned and used for agriculture today. Each year, about 30,000 more acres are lost, driven primarily by a lack of … Read more

Lisa Stifler is a Research Associate with the Community & Economic Development Program. Although rural areas are commonly considered to have lower housing costs than suburban and metropolitan areas, housing in rural communities is nonetheless a concern for many individuals, families, and communi … Read more

Imagine that you own a home, but not the land on which it sits. You’re a tenant on the land, subject to a 99-year ground lease. As a condition of the ground lease, you are permitted to sell your home only to a household earning less than the community’s median wage, and the ground lease sets a maxim … Read more