Eight dollars is almost four rides on the T and barely enough to buy a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. It’s also the number the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston put on paper a decade ago when it measured the median net worth of a U.S.-born Black Bostonian.
Eight dollars, full stop.
People spent years afterward picking apart the survey’s methodology, which was fair, since a number that low reads less like an economic finding and more like a punchline or worse, an accusation. Or maybe you think you misheard the number. Can you say that again? Fair criticism does not erase a finding, though, and a decade later the Fed went back into the field, this time across the whole of Massachusetts. The new numbers need little interpretation.
Latino families in this state now hold a median net wealth of $1,200, Black families hold $7,800, and white families hold $549,200. Say that out loud, and it stops sounding like a data point and starts sounding more like a verdict: a white family in Massachusetts holds, at the median, roughly seventy times what a Black family holds and better than four hundred times what a Latino family holds. Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander families land at $305,000, a figure that hides how much that single category flattens, given how different the histories and nationalities of these families are. None of these numbers just happened or arrived by accident. Wealth in America has rarely been a matter of effort so much as a matter of inheritance, privilege, and deck stacking. And as we have learned, it is really just a matter of who was allowed to own something long enough to pass it down.
I have written about plunder before. About how our country, whose wealth was built by extracting labor, land, and time from Black bodies and waging a war on the working poor and then legislating against those same bodies, converted that labor back into capital of their own. The redlined map, the restrictive covenant, the appraisal that quietly discounted a Black neighborhood’s worth.
We all knew it was happening. None of it was a glitch in an otherwise fair system, because the system was doing precisely what it was built to do. The Fed’s new report never uses the word plunder, but it does not need to. It lays out that the median homeowner in Massachusetts holds $790,500 in wealth while the median renter holds $1,500, and adds, almost in passing, that white households in this state own homes at a rate more than double that of Black or Latino households. Drawing the line between who was locked out of homeownership for a century and who still cannot get in the door now does not take a historian.
What strikes me most about the report is not the gap itself but rather the fact that Black and brown folx are still at the bottom. But maybe that doesn’t surprise me. Boston has spent a decade holding task forces and panels, with officials citing that original eight-dollar figure at ribbon cuttings and budget hearings and promising things would look different by now, and they do not look different. If anything, they look worse, because home prices in Massachusetts have climbed nearly ninety percent over the past decade. That means the families already standing on a ladder just watched it get taller, while everyone else watched the ladder rise further out of reach. Nobody waits patiently while a state deliberates over how to close a gap. Wealth keeps compounding in the hands that already hold it, whether anyone is paying attention or not.
Try to picture what it actually means to raise a child in a family with $7,800 to its name, where the next car repair is always one bad week away from becoming a crisis. Where the average rent for a two-bedroom is $3600 monthly. Nearly a third of Black families in this state report zero or negative net worth, which means that for one family in three, there is no ground underneath them at all, only a hole they are trying to climb out of. College becomes a loan instead of a legacy passed down, and when a parent dies, the inheritance is often grief plus debt rather than a house or a portfolio to build on. Wealth was never only about money in the bank. It buys you the ability to take a risk, change careers, survive a layoff, or walk away from an unjust boss, because something is there to catch you if it goes wrong. A state that markets itself around its universities and its reputation as a capital of opportunity cannot really claim that reputation while $7,800 sits two miles from $549,200, and this also matters for life expectancy.
Whenever a report like this lands, there is a temptation to receive it as news, to react as though the wound had not been sitting there in plain sight for as long as anyone cared to look. It had been. The eight-dollar figure was visible back in 2015, and the redlined maps behind it were visible for generations before that.
What actually shifts, report to report, is not whether the gap is visible but whether we are willing to call it the predictable outcome of policy rather than some mysterious residue of culture or effort. Every fresh report renews that choice too. We can keep treating the number as a tragedy that simply recurs on its own, the way bad weather recurs, or we can call it what it is: a ledger kept by people with names, one that people with names can still choose to balance.
Some levers already exist here, even if they are being pulled too slowly, and they fall roughly into two kinds. One kind is direct: measures that move actual money into a family’s hands in a way that shows up on a balance sheet. Affordable housing is the clearest example, since the Massachusetts Housing Partnership’s ONE+ down payment assistance program has already helped nearly 400 first-time homebuyers purchase homes in its first eighteen months, part of a coalition effort aiming to generate $170 million in new home equity for more than 700 families over the next decade. Beyond the house itself, Massachusetts has spent years debating a Baby Bonds program that would place a state-funded trust account in the name of every child born into a low-income family, money a young person could draw on at eighteen for college, a business, or a down payment of their own. A child born with $8 in their family’s name and a child born with a trust fund waiting for them are not competing on the same field, no matter how hard either one works. There is a second kind of lever too, harder to measure but no less real, closer to civic life and public psychology than to any bank account. The type of work Embrace does through its monuments and the purchase of the new building. It has to do with the physical and civic landscape a city chooses to build, and to remember. Boston’s Un-monument | Re-monument | De-monument initiative, backed by a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, is spending two years installing temporary monuments and public programming built around histories the city’s older landmarks left out, work the mayor’s office has described as a way of opening up civic engagement and conversation across the city’s public spaces. A city that only ever memorializes the people who already own it is teaching every generation after it exactly who counts, and who does not. The monuments and markers scattered through a downtown or a park or a transit corridor quietly shape who feels invited to invest there, open a business there, or build equity there in the first place. A state serious about closing this gap has reason to treat its monuments and its public spaces as part of the same ledger as its housing stock, not a separate concern entirely.
Housing policy on its own cannot undo a century of exclusion, and a trust fund handed out one child at a time will not do it either, nor will a single new monument. Put together, alongside progressive tax revenue and steady public pressure, they start to look less like scattered gestures and more like a state finally treating the wealth gap as a debt it owes rather than a weather it has to endure.
Massachusetts will put out another report in another decade, and the real question is whether that report finds the gap narrower, or simply rediscovers it all over again. History doesn’t guarantee us a happy ending here. What we get instead is a record of whatever we actually chose to do while somebody was keeping score.