Suzanne P. Kelly
By Suzanne P. Kelly, Chief of Staff
Home ownership not only establishes a sense of place, community, and stability but multiple studies show it has been the most effective intergenerational wealth building strategy Americans have known.
Yet 2023 research published by the California Housing Finance Authority, suggests that discriminatory housing practices such as redlining, racial covenants, and predatory lending has disproportionately kept Black families from owning homes at the same rate as their white peers.
In Minnesota, 77.5 percent of whites own their own home, compared to just 30.5 percent of Blacks; the 5th worst homeownership gap in the United States. Not surprisingly, that gap corresponds to an equally abysmal wealth gap among Black and White Minnesotans.
One need only look to St. Paul for a relevant example of legally sanctioned government actions that resulted in disproportionate harm to Black residents.
From 1956 to 1968, local and state leaders seized by eminent domain, land upon which hundreds of Black-owned homes, and businesses in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood sat, in order to construct a new interstate corridor. At the time nearly 80 percent of St. Paul’s Black residents lived in the Rondo neighborhood.
Björgvin Sævarsson, founder and CEO of the Yorth Group, reports that “over 700 homes were lost to I-94. Along the way, the ecosystem for the previously thriving local [Black] economy was destroyed with many businesses closing as a result.”
Sævarsson determined that the intentional routing of I-94 through the heart of Rondo resulted in a loss of at least $157 million by 2018 in intergenerational wealth being passed down from homeowners to their children and grandchildren.
Rondo is just one local example of legally sanctioned, post-slavery actions taken across the United States that have left a legacy of Black exclusion educationally, socially and economically.
Efforts to repay Black Americans for their decades of loss have rarely gained traction. But on January 4, 2023, the Saint Paul City Council voted to establish the Saint Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission.
The ordinance, which takes effect on February 13, 2023, establishes a commission that will recommend ways for the city to make reparations to Black residents whose ancestors were enslaved.
The vote came two years after the City apologized, for its role in “systemic discrimination […] perpetrated through redlining and racial covenants, access to housing, environmental injustice and the removal of St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood (Gray, 2023).”
These efforts also follow the adoption of the 2021 Ramsey County Inclusive Economic Competitiveness & Inclusion Plan, which endorsed significant local and county housing investments and acknowledged the historic policies that extracted wealth from Black families, necessitating courageous policies to catalyze systemic equity building.
The Center commends the actions of policymakers to address the wealth, unity, and community taken from the residents of the Rondo community. The multi-generational effects of the United States highway system on Black communities can truly never be measured, but our actions to repair the harms must begin now.
Learn more about the Center for Economic Inclusion’s work with Ramsey County, the City of Saint Paul and others to disrupt and dismantle systemic racism and bias to construct and sustain an inclusive, equitable and growing regional economy for all here
Learn more about the Saint Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission here.
