A new report out Tuesday tackles the yawning wealth gap between Black and white Chicagoans, laying out a set of potential solutions for bridging it, including increased homeownership, enhanced workforce and business development and universal financial literacy training.
“The State of Black Chicago 2025: A Laddered Path to Wealth Building” focuses heavily on a key data point from a report by The New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy. The 2024 findings show that the typical Black family in the Chicago metropolitan area reports a median net worth of $0, compared with $210,000 for a white family.
Chicago Urban League President Karen Freeman-Wilson said she was startled by the statistic.
“So much of our ability to get ahead, to really do well in society, is tied to our wealth. Zero wealth … means there is zero ability to really improve your lot in life, the lot of your children,” she said.
Freeman-Wilson said the organization’s report, which it releases every two years, highlights actionable ideas that bring together disparate areas it already focuses on to close the wealth gap.
She said solutions include increasing business accelerators that help entrepreneurs, more tuition-free access to trade schools and apprenticeships and expanding programs that ease the path to homeownership for Black residents.
The latter is the first step to building wealth, according to Lutalo McGee, CEO of Ani Real Estate and president-elect of the Chicago Association of Realtors. He said there has been a downward trend in homeownership rates among Black residents in the area. In 2022, there was a 34-point gap in home ownership rates between Black and white residents in Illinois, according to the National Association of Realtors.
“Step 1 is to own a home,” McGee said. “You can take the equity and buy more properties, send somebody to college … or start a business.”
McGee said the biggest hurdles for Black residents are a lack of affordable homes available for purchase and a psychological barrier where “individuals don’t believe that homeownership is a possibility.”
He is working with the Chicago Urban League to build homes in partnership with Kinexx, a modular home construction company.
Kenya Meritt, Chicago’s deputy mayor of business and neighborhood development, praised these and other efforts to build wealth in Black communities. She said the Chicago Urban League report provides a blueprint “to effectively address some of these issues. In the years to come, I would like to see some traction in these numbers.”
Merritt said many of the city’s programs are in line with the solutions offered by the report. She touted Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration’s programs to rebuild commercial corridors, support small businesses and bolster housing development.
Merritt said there is concern over the federal government’s threats to pull funding from Chicago because of its sanctuary policies for immigrants, potentially affecting the city’s efforts on diversity and equity programs, “but we’re also planning and preparing should that happen.”
She urged philanthropy and corporations to “come in and help to address some of the gaps that might happen at the federal level.”
Esther Yoon-Ji Kang is a reporter on WBEZ’s Race, Class and Communities desk. Follow her on X @estheryjkang.
Correction: After discovering an error in the Chicago Urban League report, this story was updated so that it compares the median reported net worth of Black and white families, rather than the average.