A STUDY RELEASED last week on Black homeownership in the Bay Area shows the region lost thousands of African American households after 2010.
The report, “Black Communities and the Bay Area’s Housing Crisis” by the Bay Area Equity Atlas, finds that the region lost more than 5,000 Black homeowners from 2010 to 2020 and that Black renters and homeowners were displaced from historically African American communities during that same period.
The study released Thursday includes data analysis of the nine-county Bay Area and examines the role of historically racist policies, like housing segregation in the 20th century, and more recent disasters, like the foreclosure crisis that peaked in 2010, on homeownership trends.
“These findings are more than just numbers. They represent the stories of thousands of people being forced out of their neighborhoods, cut off from community networks, and denied economic security,” said co-author Ryan Fukumori. “This displacement threatens the Bay Area’s social, economic, and cultural fabric.”
The study found that some of the most significant declines in Black homeownership were in historic Black communities in Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco and Solano County, and that Black Bay Area households are significantly less likely to own their homes than the overall population.
Also, the data shows that Black homeowners’ properties have lower median values than the overall median home values, that Black median home values appreciated less during the 2010s and that Black homeowners are more likely to have mortgage debt than the overall homeowner population.
Some of the solutions proffered by the study include investing in affordable housing, with an emphasis on subsidized low-income housing, nonprofit community land trusts and social housing.
Also, local governments can do more to prevent the conversion of existing affordable housing stock to market-rate housing, in part by encouraging community ownership of affordable housing.
The study’s authors also suggest providing reparations for victims of 20th-century mortgage redlining and housing segregation.
“Addressing the Bay Area’s housing crisis is not only possible — it’s necessary, and it requires confronting the deep-rooted inequities that are displacing Black residents from their communities today,” Fukumori said.
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