The United States is in the middle of potentially the greatest wealth transfer in the country’s history. The baby boomer generation, which accounts for one-third of all households but holds more than half of total wealth, is nearing retirement and end-of-life planning and is in the process of transferring trillions of dollars to their heirs. Given the entrenched racial disparities in wealth, created and exacerbated by historical and structural racism, this transfer of wealth has massive potential to worsen the racial wealth gap. A significant body of work has previously found that homeownership is critical to wealth building, especially among Black and Hispanic households, and that intergenerational wealth transfers play a sizable role in the persistence of racial wealth gaps. We seek to build on this existing work by investigating the relationships between homeownership, housing wealth, and intergenerational transfers, across race, ethnicity, and generation. We employ logistic regression models to examine the relationship between homeownership status and expectation to leave an inheritance, home equity and expectation to leave an inheritance, and receipt of inheritance and the likelihood of being a homeowner.

Our report presents the results of our analysis and their implications for public policy aimed at advancing racial wealth equity and upward mobility. In brief, our results are troubling and suggest that the racial disparities that we see today, which have been created and driven by outright discrimination and systemic racism, are likely to repeat and compound for generations to come. And as more and more wealth transfers across generations, the disparities created by historical policies will be locked in for the next generations. The relationships that we uncover show that although homeownership does play a large role in driving intergenerational wealth transfers, increasing access to homeownership alone will be insufficient to address long-standing racial inequities in wealth and intergenerational transfers. In our report, we discuss specific policy implications and set the agenda for future research.