Boston is a city that has built its global identity around knowledge, innovation, and institutional excellence. It is home to some of the most well-endowed universities in the world, a life sciences industry that has made Massachusetts a center of biomedical research and high-paying technical employment, and a financial and healthcare infrastructure that generates wealth at a scale few American cities can match. It is also a city where, according to 2022 estimates from the Urban Institute, Black residents have an average net worth of $11,000 — against a white average that is 180 percent higher. That gap does not exist despite Boston’s institutional wealth. It exists alongside it, and in many ways because of the same systems that produced it.
The homeownership dimension makes the structural argument most legible. Only 34 percent of Black families in Boston own their homes, compared to 68 percent of white households. Latino homeownership sits at 28 percent. Homeownership is the primary vehicle through which working and middle-class American families build intergenerational wealth — it is the asset that appreciates, that can be borrowed against, that can be passed to children as a foundation rather than a starting point of zero. When Black and Latino families in Boston own homes at half the rate of white families, they are being excluded from the primary mechanism of wealth accumulation in a city where property values have risen dramatically over the past two decades. That exclusion is not the product of individual financial decisions. It is the accumulated consequence of redlining, urban renewal demolition, and discriminatory lending practices that systematically denied Black households access to the mortgage credit that built white wealth in the postwar period — and of a Fair Housing Act that arrived too late to undo what had already been compounded into the landscape.
The credential gap compounds the homeownership gap in ways that are specific to Boston and rarely acknowledged in a city that treats educational attainment as its primary answer to economic inequality. White college graduates in the greater Boston area have a median wealth of approximately $389,000. Black college graduates hold approximately $74,000 — a gap that persists after controlling for the variable that Boston’s political and institutional class most reliably points to as the solution. The life sciences boom that is reshaping the Massachusetts economy and producing some of its highest-paying employment is not meaningfully integrating Black workers into its upper tiers. The institutions that sell the credential as the pathway to economic mobility are not delivering equivalent returns across racial lines. That discrepancy is not a pipeline problem that more education will resolve. It is a structural problem that more education has already failed to resolve, repeatedly, in the city most likely to claim education as its answer.
The number that first forced Boston to confront this gap publicly was a single digit — a 2015 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study found that U.S.-born Black households in the greater Boston area had a median net worth of just $8, against $247,500 for white households. That figure went viral, prompted an emergency meeting of 700 Black Bostonians in Dorchester, and led to the creation of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, which has become one of the city’s most significant advocacy organizations for Black economic inclusion. The $8 figure has been updated and contextualized by subsequent research — the Urban Institute’s more recent estimates suggest the gap, while still severe, sits at a different absolute level — but the underlying conditions that produced it have not changed proportionally. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is now working to update the original study with a broader sample and statewide scope. That update is necessary and overdue. What it will almost certainly confirm is that the gap between Boston’s institutional wealth and its Black community’s wealth remains one of the most extreme of any major American city.
The policy levers that exist are known and have been tested in pieces. Baby bonds — universal wealth-building accounts seeded at birth and scaled to family wealth — would directly address the intergenerational transmission of the gap. Community land trusts protect against displacement in neighborhoods where rising property values follow investment without benefiting existing Black residents. Targeted small business lending, community reinvestment enforcement, and appraisal reform that corrects for the systematic undervaluation of Black-owned property all address specific mechanisms through which the gap is maintained. The Black Economic Council of Massachusetts has made meaningful progress in pushing these conversations into institutional spaces that previously ignored them. What Boston has not yet done is act at the scale the data demands — treating the racial wealth gap not as a historical legacy to be gradually addressed but as an active, ongoing product of decisions being made right now, in lending offices, in hiring processes, in zoning boards, and in the corridors of the institutions that define the city’s identity and have not yet fully reckoned with who that identity excludes.
Part of The Local Ledger — an ongoing SSC series. Read the series framing piece here: [The Local Ledger: What Your City’s Wealth Gap Actually Looks Like]. Previous installments: [The Local Ledger: Baltimore] | [The Local Ledger: Boston] | [The Local Ledger: Chicago] | [The Local Ledger: Los Angeles].