Homeownership

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include inequality, retirement, the workforce, and financial services.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include housing, retirement, wealth disparities, employment, and government assistance.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include retirement security, racial wealth disparities, housing, and homelessness.

The Urban Institute has a new report out today that looks at America's wide(ning) racial wealth gap: research shows that while white Americans have on average double the income of black Americans, they have more than six times the wealth. The report demonstrates that wealth inequality is actually increasing, not decreasing over time. Watch Signe-Mary McKernan, one of the report's authors, explain the dynamics of the gap in this short, engaging video:

The real problem in the long term, McKernan points out, is that racial wealth disparities limit access to economic opportunity. Wealth provides the foundation on which families enter and remain in the middle class. As the report explains, "traditionally powerful wealth-building vehicles" such as retirement savings or homeownership have near and long-term benefits: they help families weather economic downturns and offer future generations a stepping stone to greater economic success.

The authors are quick to note that the recent Great Recession did not cause these racial wealth gaps, but did exacerbate them.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include financial security, housing, gender equality, the safety net, and workforce and consumer protection.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include housing, unemployment, financial products, taxes, and inequality.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include personal finance and retirement saving, inequality, government assistance, and financial services.

This morning the President released his budget request for FY 2014. Not everyone looks forward to this annual occurrence as much as Reid Cramer, but as a document that lays out a vision for how our government should work, we should all take notice.

Last Friday, following our event exploring the impact of the Great Recession on suburban families, senior writer for The American Prospect, Monica Potts, sat down with Reid Cramer to discuss her recent piece "The Weeklies." You can listen to their conversation by clicking below.

As Potts explained at the event, the families she interviewed do not necessarily self-identify as homeless and they struggle to negotiate their new daily realities living in poverty. Some earn just enough that they don't qualify for public assistance but not so much that they can afford to get back into stable housing.

The Asset Building Program hosted an event last week to examine the rise of suburban homelessness and the broader impact of the Great Recession on homeownership and the American middle class. We invited Monica Potts, senior writer for The American Prospect, to discuss her new piece “The Weeklies,” which takes an intimate look at a cohort of newly homeless families living in hotels in suburban areas. Janis Bowdler, Economic Policy Director with the National Council of La Raza, weighed in on the interplay of the foreclosure and housing crisis with family wealth, community resilience, and the social safety net. Reid Cramer framed and moderated the conversation.