BET's The Timeline series breaks down the biggest issues shaping Black lives today by connecting the dots between history and the present. No fluff, no lectures.

Scared of how Waffle House’s new egg surcharge will hit your pockets? That should be the least of your worries.

While the cost of everything from eggs to cars played a significant role in the 2024 election, there’s a real crisis in America that could potentially set Black wealth back decades over the next few years: racist housing policies. These policies didn’t just happen in the past—they’re still shaping where we live, how much our homes are worth, and who gets to build generational wealth.

The Trump administration immediately began dismantling initiatives launched by the Biden administration to address the systemic racism baked into government policies—initiatives that were designed to tackle the yawning racial wealth gap that has persisted for nearly a century.  

“I’m pretty concerned that we’re going to see two things: the first will be a lack of enforcement so that lenders who are not lending in redlined communities, who are not lending in low-income areas are going to escape any kind of enforcement at the federal level,” Jason Richardson, senior director of research at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, told BET."

And I think we can expect this administration to attack the very concept of structural racism because it is kind of anathema to their worldview.”

The consequences of ignoring structural racism’s impact on the housing market could be devastating for Black wealth. The gap between Black and white household wealth is already staggering: White families have more than six times the wealth than Black families, with median net worths of $284,310 and $44,100 respectively, according to the Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances. The survey reports household wealth by race and asset class, such as checking and savings accounts, home equity, and retirement accounts. 

Scary trends pop out when you dive into the data.

Home equity is the largest source of wealth for both Black and white Americans. In 2022, 73% of whites owned homes compared to just 46% of Blacks. And even when Black families do own homes, they’re worth much less—$123,000 in median equity compared to $205,000 for white homeowners. Black homeowners almost exclusively rely on their homes for financial security while whites have other bags to dip into.

The problem didn’t come out of nowhere, according to Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

Many people have heard of redlining—the practice where banks literally drew red lines on maps around Black neighborhoods to deny mortgages—but that’s only part of the story. Redlining was officially outlawed in 1968, and is only a slice of the numerous ways that public policy locked Black people out of homeownership and conspired to depress equity once the doors were finally opened.

After World War II, the federal government gave developers money to subsidize homebuilding in suburbs across the country but only on the condition that Black homebuyers were not allowed to buy there. According to Rothstein, over time, the value of those homes has multiplied by as much as 20 times, creating a head start that’s the basis for today’s wealth gap.

“African-American incomes are about 60% of white incomes,” Rothstein tells BET. “You’d think that if the income ratio is 60%, the wealth ratio would also be 60%. In reality, African-American wealth today is somewhere around 12% to 13% of white wealth and that enormous disparity is almost entirely constituted of housing policies practiced by the federal government.”

“I think that’s where our focus needs to be.”

For a quick minute, that’s exactly where the federal government’s focus was. 

On his first day in office in 2021, then-President Joe Biden ordered every federal agency to create equity action plans designed to root out systemic discrimination in public policy. It was a historic announcement; not even presidents like Obama, Clinton, LBJ or JFK had ever tasked the entire federal government with attacking institutional bias at the root of its power.

Homeownership was one of the top priorities. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 2022 unveiled the Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) plan, aimed at using data to bring accountability to the home appraisal industry. That same year, the Brookings Institution found that home appraisal bias contributed to homes in Black neighborhoods being undervalued by 21% to 23% compared to similar homes in non-Black communities. That cost Black homeowners an estimated $162 billion, the study found.

HUD also struck a partnership with the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, an industry group representing Black real estate agents, to train realtors on fair housing practices. And it gave $54 million in grants in 2023 to more than 180 fair housing organizations to investigate potential violations of the Fair Housing Act.

But while racism has had its finger on the scale of the American housing market for nearly a century, those initiatives were short-lived, with many Biden-era programs effectively dismantled or abandoned under the new administration. 

The PAVE landing page on HUD's website now results in a 404 error, telling visitors, “You are not authorized to access this page.”

The new administration's hostility to acknowledging that race remains a factor in American life makes it a near-lock that the federal government won’t act to close the same wealth gap it helped create. And while the government idles, the gap is growing. Between 2013 and 2022, the percentage of whites’ household wealth consisting of home equity stayed flat at about 19%. For Blacks, it grew by 11 percentage points, from 33% to 44%.

In other words, while white families have increasingly diversified their assets over time, Black families are becoming increasingly dependent on their homes as their primary source of financial security—just as protections against housing discrimination are being rolled back.

Richardson said Black homeowners and housing advocates need to shift their focus to local policies like zoning, community investment, and property tax assessments, all of which have a direct impact on property values and thus, wealth through home equity.

"Local communities still have a lot of power,” Richardson said. “Thinking through ways that local, state, county and city governments can direct funding is where we’re going to be turning for the next four years.”