Not for more recent periods where real estate values had more upward trends. Those periods also coincided with government programs to encourage home ownership, but the administration of such programs limited black people from being able to use them as effectively as white people.
Also, even if home equity happened to be a mediocre investment compared to other things, most people would otherwise just spend all of their money instead of saving and investing it. So many people built up home equity wealth because they were forced to, when they would not have built any wealth otherwise. Also, due to leverage, the upside can be very large, though the downside is limited.
I don’t see how you can make this claim without looking at imputed rent. If I buy a house, I can live in it. If I don’t buy a house, but instead rent an equivalent house, I have to pay rent every month. Therefore, I have to consider my hypothetical rent payment when I consider the investment value of buying a house.
That is, when considering housing as an investment, I have to compare. If I buy a house, live in it for ten years, pay taxes, mortgage payments and maintenance, and then sell it, how much money do I clear? Is it more or less than the money I’d have if I instead rented an equivalent house for ten years and used the remaining money that I would have spent on my house to buy an index fund?
You might claim that someone buying a house for an investment is buying a bigger house than they would have rented, if they were renting. But nobody is claiming that. People by and large buy the house they want to live in.
Looking only at aggregate national housing prices for the entire 1890-2019 period is misleading in at least three ways. First, as clearly indicated in the graph in the article you linked, housing prices dropped substantially from 1890 until about 1941, with the trend generally downward from an index figure of 100 to somewhere around 70. Since then. housing prices have increased from 70 to around 170, with the trend generally upward. The downward trend from 1890-1941 isn’t particularly relevant for most of us living today, and if you calculate ROI with 1890 as the start date, it will mask much stronger gains in the post WWII period.
Second, we don’t have a single national housing market, we have a series of local markets, and they don’t all move in the same direction. If you bought a house in Buffalo in the 1960s it probably hasn’t given you a great ROI, but if you bought a house in Boston in the 1960s you’re probably doing quite well. According to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Between 1950 and 2000, the price of housing grew by an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 2.2 to 3.5 percent in the ten U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest rates of growth, and by 0.5 to 1.1 percent in the ten U.S. metropolitan areas with the lowest rates of growth.” In short, housing has been a much better investment in some markets than in others.
Third, even within major markets, there are huge locational variations. In Rust Belt cities like Detroit and Chicago, redlining combined with unscrupulous real estate practices like blockbusting and panic-peddling kept housing extremely segregated by race. As upwardly mobile black families moved into previously all-white areas, white families would flee and soon the area would be redlined, drying up mortgage lending. Falling demand combined with lack of mortgage lending would depress housing prices in the newly turned-over areas, while housing prices in the predominantly white suburbs increased in value. Black homeowners were stuck with a low or negative ROI while many white suburban homeowners did much better (though the white homeowners who sold in panic often incurred steep losses). This is where the wealth gap comes in, and you just won’t see it if you assume everyone’s house price moves in lockstep with national aggregate house prices.
Returning to the actual 1619 Project, did you read the poems? Did you like them? Which one did you like the best? Did it change your views about how slavery fits into our shared history?
I tend to avoid poetry, which doesn’t really make sense since every time I’ve read it I’ve appreciated its power. The ones for 1619 Project struck me the same way, but “July 27, 1816” by Tyehimba Jess really stands out. The word-weaving is dazzling, but the phrase “stealing themselves” is what had the most impact on me. Just reading those words made me stop and remember that it was as simple as that – you didn’t belong to your own self.