What if we were as serious about increasing Black homeownership as we are about decreasing inflation?

Look no further than today’s headlines to know that we are serious about reducing inflation, almost regardless of the public outcry or collateral damage.

This month alone, we have witnessed the second- and third-largest bank failures in American history and a fire sale of the 166-year-old Swiss bank where I began my career, all precipitated by the most rapid rate increases in U.S. history designed to break the back of inflation.

And today, the Federal Reserve raised the benchmark rate again. Because we are serious about reducing inflation, and we will.

In the early days of the pandemic, the Trump administration announced Operation Warp Speed. We would slash through regulatory red tape and massively accelerate the virtually miraculous vaccine development process. We would enlist our greatest minds and genuinely cutting-edge science to save millions of lives.

We were serious about developing a COVID-19 vaccine, and we did. Quickly. Four of them.

The phrase “moonshot” goes back to President Kennedy’s now-famous 1961 speech before Congress in which he said our nation “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” A little more than eight years later, the Apollo 11 spaceflight did precisely that, using technology that did not even exist a few years earlier.

We set a precise goal. We fully committed. We achieved. When we are serious, we are unstoppable.

In 1968, following the presidential Kerner Commission’s findings after a summer of protests and riots, we passed the Civil Rights Act (Fair Housing Act), outlawing the type of repugnant discrimination the Commission blamed for many of the dramatic disparities between majority-minority neighborhoods and majority White communities.

At the time of passage, the Black homeownership rate stood at 41%, less than two-thirds of the White homeownership rate of 66%. In 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the Act’s passage, the Black homeownership rate remained at 41%, though the White rate had risen to 71%. Today the two rates remain 30 percentage points apart.

We set out to do something we know how to do. We needed no new technology, no novel scientific discovery. We did not even need to account for complex, globally interconnected economies.

Yet we set no goal, and we made no progress. Because we are not serious about increasing Black homeownership, and it shows.

What if we were?

What if we cared so much that we measured results and held ourselves accountable — the way we do when we value outcomes more than perceptions?

What if we fired politicians and bureaucrats who did not get it done, the way shareholders eject leaders when the rhetoric soars but the stock price tanks?

We want Black homeownership to grow. We are willing to contribute time, talk, and even some treasure toward that aspiration. But we are unwilling to do hard or even mildly uncomfortable things, and we squirm at the prospect of setting racially targeted goals and then working to achieve them.

For instance, while race was overtly factored into public policy for centuries (from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining), we are not comfortable factoring race into potential solutions for the disparities such policies drove. Where we take any action, we create race-neutral programs based on geography or income brackets that ignore the yawning wealth chasm driven most by homeownership differences.

Such programs are laudable. They help millions of (mostly White) American families step into homeownership. They allow hundreds of (mostly White) developers like me to generate tax-advantaged profits for (mostly White) investors. And the Black/White homeownership delta is wider today than in 1968.

We are not serious about increasing Black homeownership.

Serious people do not dig a hole in the middle of a field and then tell the team tasked with eliminating holes that they cannot use the pile of dirt or the shovels. Instead, they must shake the ground evenly across the entire field, hoping some dirt may fall into the hole over time.

We have shaken the field for 55 years — tens of billions of dollars of shaking. The hole is bigger today than it was in 1968.

What if we were fearless and grabbed the shovel? What would we do with it? What might policies look like if they were designed to increase specifically Black homeownership to a specific goal level? In other words, what would we do if we were serious?

When a municipality seeks to drive development and homeownership quickly in a particular area, it grants 10- or 20-year property tax abatements to real estate developers, making the newly constructed condos and townhomes substantially more financially appealing to buyers and thus more economically rewarding to builders. It works like a charm.

The federal government cannot require municipalities to waive property taxes, but Congress loves a good tax incentive.

What if every Black family that buys a home for the next ten years received a federal mortgage interest tax credit (not deduction) for the full life of that specific loan while removing the (recently created) federal cap on property tax deductions for that particular property and owner?

This targeted, time-limited, and modest enhancement (a credit rather than the current deduction; removing a recently created cap) would likely generate immodest results. Quickly.

Such mortgages would be valued more highly than loans with otherwise similar characteristics since they would be less likely to be paid off early (lower “EPO risk” in mortgage parlance), and default risk would be reduced due to enhanced household cash flow in tax season, all making mortgage originators especially interested in serving this community.

The industry that overtly yet legally discriminated against Black families for decades (or centuries) would have every incentive to seek out and serve those families and their heirs, all due to small, temporary tax code tweaks.

Serious people might seriously consider such a thing.

These kinds of tax incentives are hardly radical. Frankly, they are nothing compared to the veritable smorgasbord of favorable provisions the nearly exclusively White, male, and wealthy real estate development community devours in the current tax code every year, with more goodies arriving every couple of election cycles. [Full disclosure: I benefit directly and personally from many of those provisions. I am also White, male, and wealthy.]

Doing some very rough math, achieving the goal of increasing the Black homeownership rate to around 65% of all Black households (still shy of White homeownership) would mean fewer than five million Black renter families becoming owners over the next ten years. Five million is a lot, but hardly a moonshot. After all, there are roughly five million home purchases every single year in the U.S., and we would have an entire decade to deliver on this goal.

If we are serious about achieving our goal, and quickly, we will need many more home loans made to Black households. Twice as many. Today, approximately 7% of purchase money mortgages go to Black borrowers, roughly half the natural rate based on population.

For the next decade, if we required — not requested — mortgage originators doing business with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, VA, and USDA to double the percentage of mortgage loans going to Black borrowers to a steady 14% (matching the population of Black Americans), that math would almost get us to a 65% Black household homeownership rate.

We already collect data on the race and ethnicity of borrowers due to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), and originators are required to act if the HMDA data shows massive under-lending to specific communities. So even this proposed requirement is hardly more than adding precision and teeth to existing law.

If we target a 65% Black household homeownership rate by 2033 and track statistics, not speeches, we may find in a couple of years that we are making the fastest progress in history… and still not on track. What would we do then?

We could do a lot at the local level, but if we need to stay at the federal level, we could dive back into the bloated U.S. tax code that already reads like a landlord union drafted it.

What if we temporarily waived all capital gains taxes for any landlord who sells their rental property to a Black buyer purchasing the house as a primary residence?

Imagine the rapid transition some neighborhoods would experience, given the high rentership rates in majority-minority areas and the rapid appreciation (capital gains) of landlord-owned assets in those communities in recent years.

Then if we still are not trending toward our 2033 goal, we would move on to policy concept number four, then five, six, seven. You get the idea. Serious people do whatever it takes to achieve serious goals. No sleep ’til Brooklyn (where, incidentally, Black homeownership stands around 25%).

What if we were serious about increasing the Black homeownership rate in America? What if…