Same Credentials, Different Outcomes: Race and Homeownership in New York State

As a child in the 1950s, I lived in the New Jersey suburbs near New York City. Although the metropolitan area was racially diverse, the suburbs were not. I first lived in Wood-Ridge, a small town where none of my schoolmates were Black or Hispanic. In 1958, my family moved to Maplewood, adjacent to Newark, which had a large Black population. Yet only six of the 550 students in my high school graduating class were Black. The deed to the house my parents bought included a racial covenant, unenforceable by then but still present in the legal paperwork of suburban homeownership. Sixty-five years later, I pulled Census microdata for New York State and calculated homeownership rates by race, education, income, and metropolitan area. The results were striking: in New York State, a Black college-educated householder is still less likely to own a home than a White householder who never finished high school. Equal credentials do not produce equal outcomes.