Columbus is growing by leaps and bounds. So why is it 700 years behind in racial equality?

By Danae King
The Columbus Dispatch

When it comes to racial parity, Columbus lags behind other cities — by hundreds of years.

A study shows that it will take Black Columbus residents 700 years to get opportunities to improve their wealth and quality of life equal to their white neighbors.

On average, it will take Black Americans 300 years to catch up, said Duwain Pinder, a partner at the Columbus office of consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which did the research released earlier this year.

So why the 400-year difference for Columbus? Pinder said centuries of discrimination have caused huge differences in how much residents of each race earn annually in Columbus, whether or not they own a home, what level of education they receive and what opportunities they can access.

To arrive at the gap between races in different American cities, the study analyzed how all residents fared when it comes to standards of living, financial stability, quality education, stable homes, and job and skills development opportunities.

“Our gaps are larger than other places,” Pinder said, and they’re widening as the pace of progress for Black Columbus residents remains slow. “Columbus is growing economically; it’s thriving, but that growth is not being equally distributed.”

Columbus also wasn’t having “real conversations” about race and equity when other cities were, said Stephanie Hightower, president and CEO of the Columbus Urban League, who said she wasn’t shocked by how long it will take for Black Columbus residents to catch up.

Those conversations didn’t really start locally until after the murder of George Floyd Jr. in May 2020 by since-convicted Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and three other officers that sparked social justice protests against police brutality and calls for racial equality, she said.

“Other communities had already started having those conversations, and they weren’t just sweeping things under the rug,” Hightower said. “Ours got exposed during COVID and George Floyd. That’s why I think we’re still behind.”

It doesn’t help that Columbus’ zoning code hasn’t been updated since the 1950s, said Anna Teye-Kasongo, director of community partnerships at the Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio (AHACO).

“If you think about the priorities of the 1950s, segregation and sprawl were priorities,” she said.

But Columbus’ Zone-In zoning overhaul should help the city make headway on this issue and could create more than 80,000 new homes, Teye-Kasongo said.

How housing can help Columbus narrow the gap

The massive racial gap in prosperity is something that society created and, therefore, will take everyone to fix — and should be done sooner than the seven centuries it would take based on current conditions, Teye-Kasongo said.

This disparity is closely tied to the gap in homeownership between Black and white residents, she said.

“In Franklin County alone, Black families are 32% less likely to own a home than their white counterparts,” Teye-Kasongo said. “No matter where you go in our city, you have more white families able to unlock home ownership.”

One part of the solution would be to help Black residents become homeowners, she said.

Redlining and restrictive covenants denied homeownership to Black residents and others in specific areas of the city beginning in the 1930s, putting Black families behind when it comes to building home equity and generational wealth.

But owning a home is important for future generations, as the equity and stability a home offers can help families save for college, cars and more, Teye-Kasongo said. Stable housing for children also means they have better health care and education outcomes, she added.

CONVERGENCE Columbus, housed at AHACO, is a group of people locally who are trying to close the prosperity gap, Teye-Kasongo said.

The partnership is helping people get started on their journey to homeownership via www.bloom614.org, which offers tools, personal coaching and loans.

There are also many groups and initiatives striving to close homeownership and other race-related gaps locally, including the city of Columbus, the Franklin County Board of Commissioners, NAACP Columbus, YWCA Columbus, the Columbus Foundation and others.

Other solutions for the equality gap in Columbus

Beyond housing, Columbus has to help bolster Black-owned businesses, offer young people workforce readiness training and assist Black residents in improving their credit scores by teaching them how best to manage debt and build savings, Hightower said.

There has to be money behind the programs and community support, she said, and the investment may be larger than people think because of the decades of oppression.

Though there are more opportunities for minority people today, challenges remain that make it hard for them to “catch up” to the generational wealth and opportunity of their white counterparts, Hightower said.

Homeownership was increasing for Black people, for instance, but then the housing market collapsed, she said.

Regentrification is also occurring in the city’s urban core so people who have owned homes for decades are now no longer able to pay their taxes, Hightower said. As a consequence, they’re forced into selling their homes, taking away the generational wealth their children and grandchildren would have had, she said.

“These factors keep happening and keep happening and keep happening,” Hightower said. “We’re in catch-up mode.”

The gap can be closed, Pinder said. But there’s also risk of it widening if nothing — or not enough — is done.

“If we focus, we could not just make a significant difference, but I think we could be the model of how to do this and how to change the trajectory,” Pinder said.

Read article at Dispatch.com