Public funds, established by legislation, ordinance or resolution, to receive specific revenues dedicated to affordable housing development. (2004)

This alternative property ownership model encourages permanent affordability and wealth-building. (2004)

How to implement TOD -- compact, mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented communities located around new or existing public transit stations -- in a way that achieves equity goals. (2008)

In recent years a national discussion has been underway about the causes and effects of growing inequality, but one cause that has received little attention is the role of the U.S. tax code. The individual tax code contains more than $1 trillion in tax subsidies known to policymakers and economists as tax expenditures because, like spending programs, they provide financial assistance to support specific activities or groups of people. Of these subsidies, more than half a trillion, $540 billion, support some form of savings or investment (e.g., higher education, retirement, homeownership).

In theory, tax code–based public subsidies should help all families save and invest, but instead, wealthier households receive most of the benefits. In fact, a recent analysis of the largest wealth- building tax subsidies found that the top 1 percent of households received more benefits from these tax code–based subsidies than the bottom 80 percent combined.

The new brief answers key questions about tax expenditures: What are they, how do they work, and who benefits? In addition, since the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not collect tax data by race, the primer uses data related to the distribution of benefits by income quintiles and the demographics of each quintile to provide a rough approximation of how different racial and ethnic groups do or do not benefit from the different categories of tax expenditures.

Houston-Galveston is characterized by overall economic strength and resilience, but wide racial gaps in income, health, and opportunity coupled with declining wages, a shrinking middle class, and rising inequality place the region’s economic success and future at risk. Our analysis showed the region already stands to gain a great deal from addressing racial inequities. If racial gaps in income had been closed in 2012, the regional economy would have been $243.3 billion stronger: a 54 percent increase. You can also download the summary and addendum.

Find other equity profiles here.

Ensures that healthy local businesses owned by people of color are a basic component of strong, sustainable communities. (2004)