Racial Wealth Gap

March is Women’s History Month and there’s no better time to reflect on the progress women have made in the last century. It has been 92 years since women fought for and gained the right to vote in the United States. In 1963 the Equal Pay Act became federal law, which requires employers to provide equal pay for men and women performing the same job duties regardless of race, color, religion, national origin or sex of the worker. Sandra Day O’Conner became the first woman to join the Supreme Court in 1981.

Compared to homeowners in white neighborhoods, those in African-American or Latino neighborhoods are more than twice as likely to owe more on their mortgage than the house is worth, according to a report released last week by the Woodstock Institute. Minority homeowners “have far less equity to use in an emergency,” said Spencer Cowan, Woodstock’s vice president for research, in a conference call Tuesday.

Last week, the Woodstock Institute released their report "Struggling to Stay Afloat: Negative Equity in Communities of Color in the Chicago Six County Region." The report found that Chicago homeowners with mortgages in predominantly African American neighborhoods are twice as likely to be underwater than homeowners with mortgages in predominantly whit

More Chicagoland homeowners in communities of color are underwater compared to predominantly white neighborhoods, a new report from the Woodstock Institute shows, and some housing advocates say they aren’t surprised. Lucy Mullany, senior policy associate for the Heartland Alliance and the coordinator of the Illinois Asset Building Group, said the report’s findings match up with what’s going on across the country.

On November 7, 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau released the Research Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), developed based on recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Panel on Poverty and Family Assistance.