NNIP Partners Explore Drivers of Black Wealth and Wealth Equity

Urban Institute   (NNIP Coordinator)
The Data Center   (New Orleans)
Data Driven Detroit (D3)   (Detroit)
Neighborhood Nexus   (Atlanta)
Boston Indicators   (Boston)

October 2023 to December 2023

Over the past few months NNIP Partners have been using data to explore drivers of Black wealth to better understand the dynamics of wealth and inform strategies to build wealth. We highlight a few in this article:

In a plenary session at the NNIP Partners’ Meeting in Oakland, Ashley Clark of Detroit Future City, Lamar Gardere of The Data Center in New Orleans, and Carolyn Johnson of the Black Cultural Zone in Oakland helped NNIP partners reframe wealth to broaden its definition to a holistic measure and think of it as a measure of one’s ability to thrive.

As part of NNIP’s project “Advancing Black Wealth through Local Data and Engagement” funded by the Black Wealth Data Center, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies' Greenwood Initiative, Detroit Future City and Data Driven Detroit examined the role of small-dollar mortgages in Detroit’s housing market, explaining what factors influence the availability and demand for small-dollar mortgages, profiling the dynamics of small-dollar mortgages in three different Detroit neighborhoods, and providing recommendations for increasing small-dollar lending in Detroit for Black homebuyers.

Neighborhood Nexus recently supported the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative’s new framework to understand the wealth gap and develop solutions to build Black wealth with data collection and analysis.

Boston Indicators launched their Racial Wealth Equity Resource Center in 2023 to lift up resources, research, and analysis on building racial wealth equity. They completed a report “A Long Road Home: A Racial Equity Analysis of Homeownership Support Programs in Massachusetts” that analyzes the confusing array of programs and makes recommendations to improve and expand on existing practices.

More content from NNIP Partners on this topic is available here.