Abstract
Excerpted From: Rosa Newman, Public Housing Reimagined: Confronting the Racial Wealth Gap Through Section 8 Housing Subsidy Reform, 25 Berkeley Journal of Black Law and Policy 79 (2025) (229 Footnotes) (Full Document)
Step into the living room of a modern-day apartment rented with a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher on Chicago's South Side. You may see three familiar images displayed in a place of honor: a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a photo of President John F. Kennedy, and a framed picture of a soldier in uniform during World War II.1 In this Article, that housing unit belongs to Dana Carter, the great-granddaughter of James Carter; the WWII veteran whose picture hangs on her wall. She is raising two children here, in the same city where James once fought for the chance to buy a home after his military service. The apartment is well kept, but each month Dana pays her portion of the rent to a private landlord while the remainder, a federal housing subsidy, flows directly from the government to that landlord. Together, those payments steadily build the landlord's wealth, not her own. She dreams of one day owning a home with a backyard except that her housing assistance, like that of millions of other low-income Americans, is designed to subsidize rent, not build equity.
James Carter's service portrait tells another story, one of a man who returned from war in 1946, ready to claim the benefits of the G.I. Bill, only to be denied access to FHA and U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) backed credit because the neighborhood he chose to settle down in was racially mixed. Over the decades, those lost opportunities compounded, shaping the economic trajectory of his children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. Today, Dana's reliance on subsidized housing is not the product of personal failure, but rather the cumulative effect of federal housing policy running from the mid-century mortgage market to the modern Section 8 Program that has persistently offered shelter without ownership and assistance without mobility.
This Article traces that lineage and considers what could have been different. It examines the historical policy choices that locked families like the Carters out of homeownership, the structural biases embedded in programs that followed, and the resulting racial wealth disparities that persist across generations. It also asks what might have happened if those programs had been designed around ownership and equity from the start. Through a counterfactual thought experiment, this Article reimagines how housing policy might have evolved had racial equity been a founding principle rather than an afterthought. It concludes by turning to the present, arguing that reforming the modern Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program to facilitate homeownership is not just sound policy, but a necessary act of repair.
The Carters' story, while representative, is not unique. For countless Black families, homeownership, the single largest driver of intergenerational wealth in America, remains just out of reach. The Carters' journey, first under the actual policies of the 20th century, then in a reimagined history, serves as a running example throughout this Article, grounding the structural critique in the lived experience of one family. Where white veterans moved into newly built suburbs, Black veterans were often confined to high-rent apartments in neighborhoods marked for disinvestment.2 This divergence is neither coincidental nor merely economic. It is the outcome of a racially stratified housing regime built and sustained by the federal government.
From the mid-20th century onward, federal housing policy was shaped by a set of deeply racialized and market-oriented assumptions.3 One was that property ownership, and the economic security it provides, should remain closely tethered to whiteness.4 Another guiding assumption was that public assistance programs should preserve the existing distribution of capital and align with prevailing market dynamics.5 A third was that the role of housing subsidies was to offer minimal, short-term relief; not to facilitate permanent stability, mobility, or wealth-building for the poor.6 These assumptions shaped a wide range of government interventions that collectively entrenched a racialized housing regime. These included including the G.I. Bill, FHA mortgage insurance, and redlining maps, to name a few.
The Housing Choice Voucher Program, commonly known as Section 8, exemplifies this legacy. Although designed to expand access to housing, it primarily subsidizes private market actors rather than empowering the families it serves. Billions of federal dollars flow annually to landlords and private developers, underwriting their equity while leaving low-income households asset-poor and economically vulnerable.7 The state quite literally subsidizes wealth accumulation for those who already hold capital, while the intended beneficiaries remain tenants without a path to ownership.
At the heart of this system lies a deeper normative question: What is the purpose of housing policy in the United States of America? Is it to house the poor in minimally adequate conditions while insulating markets and reinforcing property-based class stratification?8 Or can it be a tool for redress, an engine for wealth-building, mobility, and equity? This Article interrogates these competing visions through a retroactive thought experiment that asks: What if racial equity had been a founding principle of federal housing policy?
This Article situates housing policy within a long arc of racialized statecraft and stategraft (a term coined by Professor Bernadette Atuahene to describe state-sanctioned theft from communities of color9) arguing that federal housing interventions have historically denied Black families access to wealth and stability, and now must be reimagined. At its heart lies a reformist project; an effort to restructure the existing Section 8 housing program so that it not only shelters low-income families but also empowers them. I write as both a Reformer and an Enabler: someone working within a deeply entrenched policy framework to make it more just, and someone committed to clearing the systemic barriers that have long excluded Black families from homeownership and intergenerational wealth-building.
Thought experiments offer a powerful tool for examining normative foundations. By imagining a world in which federal programs had been designed to build wealth and stability for all families, especially those historically excluded, we expose the assumptions that shaped real-world decisions and continue to define our policy terrain today. In doing so, the true housing regime is revealed, one which has consistently failed to view low-income families as wealth-builders or economic actors in their own right.
Instead, contemporary housing assistance programs like the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) system and Project-Based Rental Assistance (PBRA) reflect a worldview that positions the poor as passive recipients of shelter who are incapable of financial growth or ownership. These programs channel billions of public dollars each year into the pockets of private landlords, developers, and property managers, thus creating lucrative and predictable revenue streams for third-party actors.10 But, for the families ostensibly served by these programs, there is no corresponding accumulation of equity, no pathway to asset-building, and no structural support for the intergenerational transfer of wealth. The result is a deeply inequitable distribution of public investment; one that reinforces the status quo by underwriting private profits, rather than empowering the families most in need of transformative capital.
Specifically, the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program, which was originally designed to provide rental assistance to low-income tenants, exemplifies this flawed orientation. In its current use, it reflects a narrow conception of public responsibility: one that prioritizes short-term housing stability over long-term economic mobility. Yet, in the grander scheme, the Program contains the latent potential for much more. In its underutilized homeownership component,11 we find the blueprint for a more transformative vision; one in which federal housing policy equips marginalized families with the tools to own property, build equity, and participate in the same wealth-generating opportunities long afforded to white, middle-class homeowners.
The Article proceeds in five parts. After introducing the stakes of the issue in this Introduction, Part I provides a historical overview of federal housing policy that kept the Carters and millions like them as renters in an ownership economy. Part II presents a retroactive thought experiment that reimagines what that history may have looked like for families like the Carters, under a more equitable and race-neutral housing scheme. Part III then turns to the present, assessing the structural limits of the existing Housing Choice Voucher Program, critiquing its structure and function. This Part argues that the program's overreliance on the private rental market fails to deliver wealth-building opportunities for the families it serves, and instead perpetuates asset poverty by subsidizing private actors. It further explains the means and ways that the existing Section 8 Homeownership Voucher Program can be expanded to mitigate many of these concerns. Part IV concludes.
While this Article does not claim that homeownership alone can remedy the legacies of racial exclusion, it insists that any justice-oriented housing policy must begin by confronting the harms of the past and offering families the tools to build something new.
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By revisiting the foundational housing decisions of the 20th century and imagining alternative normative outcomes, this thought experiment reveals not only the magnitude of what was lost, but also the plausibility of a different future. Had federal policy embraced inclusion, mobility, and asset-building from the outset, the American housing landscape could have been a site of convergence, not division. The Carter family's experience illustrates how modest changes at key policy junctures could have produced materially different outcomes.
Today, Dana Carter sits in her Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher unit on Chicago's South Side, beneath the same three portraits that opened this Article: Dr. King, President Kennedy, and her great-grandfather James Carter in uniform. Each month, she pays her portion of the rent while the federal government sends the rest directly to her landlord, a reliable revenue stream for that family, but no equity or lasting benefit for her own. Under a reformed Section 8 Homeownership Program, one designed as a tool of repair, Dana could apply that same subsidy toward a mortgage, beginning a wealth-building journey that federal policy denied her family for nearly eighty years. These reimagined policies offer a blueprint for what justice-oriented housing reform might still accomplish. They remind us that the racial wealth gap is not a historical inevitability, but rather the outcome of design. And it can be redesigned.
By removing racially biased policy decisions and replacing them with neutral, equity-driven alternatives, the United States could have rewritten the housing story for millions of Black families. While history cannot be undone, this thought experiment highlights how federal commitment to fair housing, particularly through equitable lending and ownership access, might have fostered the very stability, prosperity, and community cohesion the FHA claimed to support.
Furthermore, this alternative model of equitable housing policy would have significantly altered the racial wealth gap we observe today. Homeownership has historically been the largest driver of wealth accumulation for American families. According to the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the median net worth of white families ($284,310) was nearly eight times that of Black families ($44,100).228 And the general trend is that of home equity comprising a larger share of total assets for low- to middle-income families when compared to upper-income families.229 Had Black Americans been granted equal access to the housing market in the mid-20th century, they would have accrued generations of home equity, capital gains, and intergenerational transfers. These transfers would have not only yielded greater economic security but increased access to higher education, entrepreneurship, and political influence. By failing to extend these benefits to Black Americans, government policy helped entrench systemic inequality. The alternative model envisioned here offers a plausible pathway for how targeted interventions in housing equity could have served as the foundation for closing the racial wealth gap.
We are once again at a defining juncture in the nation's housing story. In the wake of recent racial and economic reckonings, the public appetite for reform remains strong, even as the political environment increasingly favors reducing the federal footprint and shifting resources toward programs that position recipients for eventual independence. In this climate, a reimagined housing policy must reconcile two imperatives: repairing the long-term effects of exclusion and structuring assistance as a bridge to self-sufficiency.
An updated Section 8 homeownership model, one where subsidies flow directly to families as mortgage assistance rather than to landlords as rent, could meet both aims. By converting existing housing dollars into equity-building instruments, such a program would honor the call for limited, outcome-oriented government while delivering the enduring benefits of ownership to those historically denied it. The result is not a retreat from public responsibility, but a recalibration that transforms federal support from a perpetual safety net into a catalyst for generational stability and self-sufficiency.
The future of housing policy will depend on whether we continue to underwrite exclusion through rent subsidies to private actors or instead invest directly in families through tools like homeownership. If we are to confront the racial wealth gap with the seriousness it demands, we must move beyond temporary shelter toward generational stability. A redesigned Section 8 Homeownership Program, coupled with a targeted loan product, offers one such pathway, a means of transforming public assistance from a stopgap into a springboard.
For Dana Carter, and for many other residents descended from Black veterans who served their country but were excluded from the benefits of the GI Bill, such a reform would represent a long-overdue act of federal accountability. It would allow housing policy to finally support the kind of family wealth and stability that others were afforded generations ago.
A just housing policy must do more than house the poor. It must empower them. That transformation is not merely a policy proposal; rather, it is a moral imperative.
Assistant Professor, Elon University School of Law; Dean Louis Westerfield Fellow (2020-2022), Loyola University New Orleans College of Law; J.D., University of Iowa College of Law. I am grateful to the participants of the Lutie A. Lytle Workshop and Writing Retreat, and to Professors John Lovett, Andy Haile, Myrisha Lewis, Cary Martin Shelby, Norrinda Brown Hyat, Saleema Snow, Christopher Odinet, Robert Schwemm and Ezra Rosser for their invaluable comments and insights both individually and in workshop settings. Special thanks to Professors Mitch Crusto and Steven Friedland for their encouragement and guidance throughout the writing process.
