Racial equity

Special collection

Racial equity can be defined as "the condition that would be achieved if one's race identity no longer influenced how one fares." (from "Awake to Woke to Work: Building a Race Equity Culture" by Equity in the Center). This collection focuses on racial equity and also includes works that explore the larger diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) framework. Our aim is to raise awareness about funding for racial equity efforts as well as activities in the social sector meant to realize racial equity. The collection is part of Candid's Funding for racial equity special issue website.

More ways to engage:
- Add your organization's content to this collection.
- Send us content recommendations.
- Easily share this collection on your website or app.

Search this collection

Clear all

12 results found

reorder grid_view

Addressing the Legacies of Historical Redlining: Correlations with Measures of Modern Housing Instability

January 24, 2023

"Redlining" of neighborhoods, one of a number of explicitly racist United States federal housing policies in the mid–twentieth century, blocked Black households and other communities of color from accessing home mortgages—and as a result homeownership—for decades. The practice has been linked to present day racialized neighborhood poverty and ongoing negative impacts on formerly redlined neighborhoods.In an attempt to address or mitigate decades of racist housing policies, some policymakers and jurisdictions are considering reparative policies and otherwise prioritizing Black households and others disenfranchised by past racist housing policies. Given the prominence of redlining maps and analyses that find associations between redlining and negative impacts on neighborhoods, some policy makers have focused on redlined areas as a criteria for qualifying for direct assistance.In this brief, we explore the extent to which historical redlining patterns correlate with current risk of housing instability. Using redlining maps for more than 200 cities digitized by the University of Richmond as a base and a number of instability indicators including the Urban Institute's Emergency Rental Assistance Priority (ERA Priority) Index, eviction filing data from the Eviction Lab, and Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) data, we examine the extent to which redlined areas correlate with concentrations of people who are most at risk of housing instability. It is important to note that the overall practice of restricting access to housing based on race still happens today, but for the purposes of this brief, when we talk about redlining, we mean the legacy of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).

Black Homeownership: Using Data to Navigate the Road to Equity

January 24, 2023

The United States' long-standing racial homeownership gap needs to be reckoned with. In the past two years, increasing attention has been aimed at removing barriers that keep Black households from buying homes and sustaining homeownership. One of these efforts, the Black Homeownership Collaborative, set an ambitious goal to increase the number of Black homeowners by 3 million by 2030. This brief offers a dashboard to guide stakeholders working to close the racial homeownership gap by increasing the number of Black homeowners. We analyze the latest data to understand whether progress was made in 2020 and 2021 and where more work is needed.

How Higher Mortgage Interest Rates Can Widen Racial Gaps in Housing Wealth: The Case of Newark, New Jersey

August 30, 2022

Trends in macroeconomic conditions and policy have helped to boost longer-term interest rates, including mortgage rates, over the past year. This has important implications for the wealth gap between white and Black or Hispanic households. The standard narrative is that higher interest rates, especially when combined with higher house prices and lower incomes, reduce homebuying affordability for Black and Hispanic households relative to white households. And this, in turn, implies that these households of color will find that achieving homeownership has become more difficult, thereby widening the racial wealth gap. This report illustrates that under a higher mortgage rate regime, the pace of principal reduction is slower over most of the life of a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. Using data covering purchase loans on one-to-four family mortgages across the city of Newark, NJ, we also show that Black and Hispanic households buying in Newark obtain higher mortgage rates relative to their white peers and therefore pay more in interest for a slower principal reduction. In response, we suggest that more local policymakers assess the benefits of interest-rate buy-downs to improve affordability, close racial wealth gaps in housing, and better insulate historically marginalized communities from macroeconomic shocks.

Building a Housing Justice Framework

August 17, 2022

Having a safe, affordable, and quality place to call home is fundamental to individual, family, and community life. Across the US, however, people and communities experience high rates of housing insecurity, a reality fueled by historical and ongoing discriminatory practices and racist housing policies. To remedy these and other inequities, a growing number of advocates, organizers, policymakers, and researchers are calling for a structural overhaul of the country's housing system. They aim to dismantle the factors that contribute to housing instability, so that everyone—regardless of their race, income, gender identity, disability, and/or sexuality—can live in a safe, affordable home.This report explores the concept of "housing justice" as a framework for confronting and repairing housing inequality and community harm on a structural level. We unpack key principles and precedents of the housing justice framework, arriving at an initial working definition of housing justice: "Increasing access to safe, affordable housing and promoting wealth-building by confronting historical and ongoing harms and disparities caused by structural racism." Altogether, this framework aims to strengthen our toolkit for addressing housing injustice, a social problem that impacts all systems and that is rooted in historical and current structural racism.

Race, Place and Power: Learnings from the Ford Foundation’s Just Cities and Regions Program

April 28, 2022

Housing insecurity is a challenge affecting the lives of far too many in the United States. After decades of work in the housing sector, we formalized the Just Cities and Regions (JCR) program in 2015 amidst a moment of growing racial and income inequality, increasing housing insecurity, and an accelerating climate crisis with disparate impacts. The strategy shifted from one based in 10 metro regions to one that aimed to bring about more systemic change across the country.JCR worked to integrate distinct dimensions necessary to winning change at scale by:Building community- and people-centered grassroots power through integrated civic engagement strategiesGrounding those strategies in the leadership and vision of communities disproportionately impacted, anchored by an ecosystem of strong, networked social movement infrastructureFocusing on creating systems-level interventions rather than public policy reform or near-term "fixes"Supporting relationship-based and long-term co-governance by communities and those in public leadership rolesWe sunset the JCR program at the end of 2021. In this reflection, we share our lessons throughout our history of investment.

Advocating For Equity in California’s Housing Crisis

August 13, 2021

In California, a statewide network of racial and economic justice organizations are placing the housing needs of low-income communities of color at the center of efforts to advance housing justice.Read the profile to learn more about the experiences and impacts of this work from the perspectives of the community members, grassroots and community organizations, and funder partners involved.

Racial Justice in Housing Finance: A Series on New Directions

May 19, 2021

The enclosed essays speak from a range of diverse viewpoints to explore how housing finance can be harnessed towards the ends of residential integration, equitable investment, and housing security, rather than purely for profit. Our authors offer ideas across a spectrum of proposed reforms. They describe how aspects of our current housing finance system derive from, or fail to correct for, our deep history of structural racism; they propose concrete steps toward re-engineering our current regulatory structure and housing programs to better advance equity, including addressing the particular harms of racial segregation; and they argue for expanded social housing and other visionary reforms.

Centering Racial Equity in Homeless System Design

April 27, 2021

Between 2017 and 2019, homelessness sharply increased by 43% in Alameda County, California. Housing market failures, homeless system challenges, and long-standing discrimination have produced a crisis in affordable housing and homelessness, which has significantly impacted low-income people and communities of color. The surge in homelessness and its disproportionate racial impacts, especially on African Americans and Native Americans, became the impetus for a revamp of the homeless system modeling process to ensure that it is restructured to employ a racial equity lens. With the goal of producing a homeless system that works better for all to end homelessness in Alameda County, this system modeling process seeks to: 1) Identify and address factors leading to the over-representation of people of color in the population of people experiencing homelessness. 2) Understand how facets of the homeless system benefit or burden people of color and pinpoint opportunities to advance racial equity within the system. 3) Formulate key elements of a model homeless system, including optimal types and quantities of housing units and service programs; and 4) Develop recommendations to more effectively and equitably allocate resources, prioritize investments, and advance proactive, targeted strategies to end and prevent homelessness.

Advancing Racial Equity in Emergency Rental Assistance Programs

March 1, 2021

The NYU Furman Center, together with the Housing Initiative at Penn and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, recently co-authored a report describing these "first-generation" COVID rental assistance programs, based on a survey of 220 programs across the country. This brief draws upon the analysis from that survey, along with additional document review and interviews with selected program administrators. Based on these sources, the brief highlights several lessons about strategies states and localities can use to design and implement more equitable emergency rental assistance programs.

Advancing Racial Equity in Housing and Community Development: An Anti-Racism Guide for Transformative Change

February 1, 2021

Racial equity will be achieved only through intentional actions and decisions. Even with intentionality, racial equity will be difficult to put into operation. Within the field of housing and community development, racial equity approaches intend to proactively address the enduring racism within contemporary policies, programs and practices that routinely advantage White people while further producing negative outcomes for people of color. Furthermore, racial equity approaches must also be focused to address the enduring racism within the private corporate sectors of the banking, investment, and real estate industries. Effective racial equity approaches also explicitly recognize the cultural assets, resilience, and strengths within communities of color. This means centering communities of color in the process of advancing change.

Funders Together to End Homelessness: A Racial Equity Learning Journey

December 10, 2020

Funders Together to End Homelessness began its racial equity journey in 2016. Its case story explains how the PSO named racial equity in its strategic plan and embarked on a learning journey together with its board, staff, and members to normalize the conversation about structural and historic racism and how it contributes to disparities in the homelessness system. The story also describes how Funders Together created a two-year community of practice, called Foundations for Racial Equity (FRE), that has been a critical part of its journey, and how its codified its racial equity work through the creation of its Commitment to Racial Equity.

Challenging Race as Risk: Implicit Bias in Housing

December 9, 2016

The ability to exercise agency over where one lives is a hallmark of freedom. And yet, this privilege has not been equally afforded to all. Race has been—and continues to be—a potent force in the distribution of opportunity in American society. Despite decades of civil rights successes and fair housing activism, who gets access to housing and credit, on what terms, and where, remains driven by race. This is important to our shared future, because investments in homeownership are multiple and generational. Indeed, research shows that the biggest factor in the Black-White wealth gap is years of homeownership, showing how critical positive home equity is to building wealth. Racialized systems that generate lasting inequality may perpetuate self-fulfilling expectations, where "structural disadvantages (e.g., poverty, joblessness, crime) come to be seen as cause, rather than consequence, of persistent racial inequality, justifying and reinforcing negative racial stereotypes."There is a clear record of the impact of structural racism on opportunities for people of color in home-buying and credit access today. Structural racism describes the process by which policies, organizations, institutions, systems, culture and history interact across institutional domains to produce and sustain racial inequality. In terms of housing and credit, racial residential segregation has been a critical structural force. For example, historically, people of color have been restricted from buying homes in particular neighborhoods, regardless of their ability to pay, through practices such as racial covenants or redlining. Today's exclusions are less overt, but segregation remains, thus limiting people from the benefits that we know attends living in neighborhoods of high opportunity. W.E.B. DuBois acknowledged one hundred years ago that the health of minority populations is heavily influenced by the social institutions around them.1 Not only do housing and credit form the lifeline for our national economy, but they serve as the economic lifeline for many of us individually. Housing and credit can influence our daily lives: the better one's access to safe, affordable housing, the better one's outcomes tend to be along a range of indicators of individual, family, and community well-being.