I still remember walking through my first home — my only home — back in 2005.
It had hardwood floors, a garage with a covered deck, a backyard, an enclosed back porch that could be used as an additional room and a finished attic featuring a master bedroom and a family room.
In the partially finished basement, there was a laundry room and enough open space for my three young daughters to run laps, play hide-and-seek and perform other feats of mischief.
And the icing on the cake was this cherry brick, Chicago-style bungalow was about a mile away from the three-flat — and the third-floor apartment my mother rented — where I spent most of my childhood.
I’d returned to my old neighborhood, Auburn Gresham on the South Side, but this time I was a homeowner. It was a dream come true.
A few years later, my dream had become an economic nightmare.
When the mortgage-lending crisis and the Great Recession landed on America, it stunted economic growth practically everywhere across the country. Recovery was slow, but things eventually bounced back for most Americans. Not so for many Black Americans.
In predominantly Black communities, like mine at the time, recovery never seemed to come. By 2017, I’d invested heavily in my home from the rooter to the tooter. The screen doors and practically all of the windows had been replaced. The enclosed back porch had been renovated, central air conditioning and a new roof had been installed.
After all of that, the estimated worth of my upgraded home — which I bought in 2005 for $165,000 — was $75,000. My dream was $90,000 under water. And there was no lifeguard on duty to rescue me. I’d sought repeatedly to refinance the home to help slow the bleeding, but the lender kept losing the paperwork or presenting some other problem that prevented things from moving forward.
I was frustrated. That frustration turned to anger. And finally, that anger fizzled into resignation. Ultimately, I gave up and walked away from the home. I figured foreclosure was worth it just to get out from under what seemed like an albatross around my neck.
Almost a decade later, I’m at peace with that decision, though I still question if it was the right move. Maybe things would eventually get better. I no longer trusted what I’d always been told. I became disillusioned with the so-called American dream.
What I’ve taken away from it is that the tried-and-true beliefs we hold about American capitalism just don’t apply quite the same for Black Americans. Black people live different lives than other Americans, and Black communities occupy alternate realities. It’s like a real-life multiverse where the laws of physics shift when you visit an alternate world, especially when you go from a white one to a Black one.
What’s marketable in one North Side universe — proximity to downtown, public transit and the lakefront — doesn’t seem to attract the same level of interest in an equally positioned universe on the South Side.
The invisible barriers that prevent people — and their hard-earned dollars — from traveling North to South don’t block travelers and commerce from moving in the opposite direction. As a result, billions of dollars shift from one universe to another each year. It should be enough to wash away the notion that there’s no buying power on the South Side, but it isn’t.
Chicago’s racial wealth gap is mind-boggling. The typical Black family reported virtually no wealth, while the typical white family reported more than $200,000 in wealth, according to the “Color of Wealth” report released last year and recently referenced by the Chicago Urban League’s “2025 State of Black Chicago” report.
Some might view that gap as evidence of underachievement, financial mismanagement or spendthrift habits. For sure, there’s some of that, but I’d argue it’s not significantly greater than what you’d find elsewhere. What’s missing from that analysis of Black Chicago’s lack of wealth is the alternative reality in which Black communities exist.
From restrictive covenants to redlining to contract buying to subprime lending (or no lending, at all) to segregation to disinvestment to gentrification, Black Chicago has lived a reality that no other community in this city can claim — no one.
Black communities are privileged to live by the same rules as everyone else, and thus they shouldn’t be judged by comparing them to communities that don’t exist in the same universe and don’t have to live by the same rules.
At the same time, the remedies to address the racial wealth gap in Chicago might also have to look different than they would in another universe — and so should the effort.
Then again, that’s something that Black folks in Chicago’s multiverse should know all too well — you have to work twice as hard to get half as far. By that math, maybe if we work four times as hard, we can get what everyone else gets.
Alden Loury is data projects editor for WBEZ and writes a column for the Sun-Times.
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