Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality - Tenth Anniversary Edition
IASP's Hannah Thomas was invited by the Ohio State University Kirwan Institute's Future of Fair Housing initiative to write a paper, An Ethnographic View of Impact: Asset Stripping for People of Color, describing the impacts of foreclosure on families in Boston. This work is based on in-depth interviews with families in foreclosure in 2007 and 2008 and points to the ways that foreclosure can lead to asset stripping for people of color.
In "Community Assets - Expanding Beyond Individual Asset Ownership" Hannah Thomas and Thomas Shapiro build a case for the asset field to look to not only individual forms of ownership, but also to community forms of ownership that resonate with a place-based approach to community development.
Several states and cities are at varying stages in forming initiatives that take a holistic approach to asset policy development. This chart provides an update of the status of these initiatives, and their goals and accomplishments.
Asset-building strategies can broaden the American promise of ownership. But they can't succeed on the cheap, or by shifting even more risks to the poor, writes IASP Director Thomas Shapiro in the latest issue of The American Prospect.
Full Article
American Prospect website
The 10th Anniversary Edition contains two new chapters that look at the increase in racial wealth inequality in the past ten years and the new policies that have been launched to address it.
Building a Real "Ownership Society"
In this publication, J. Larry Brown, Robert Kuttner and Thomas M. Shapiro challenge the White House over how to build a true "ownership society." The authors note that the Administration's stated goal of promoting ownership is being undermined by proposed policies, which are at odds with how social investments actually built the nation's middle class. This cutting-edge analysis is expected to provide an alternative vision that holds promise to be successful.
Over 90 people from policy organizations, academia, religious groups, government, labor and business came together in 2003 at the Women and Assets Summit on March 31 and April 1 to explore how asset building relates to women's lives. The Summit was sponsored by the Asset Development Institute and the National Center on Women and Aging. View the opening remarks by Larry Beeferman.
In an article in the Boston Review, J. Larry Brown and Larry W. Beeferman argue that the welfare reauthorization debate is the domestic policy opportunity of the near future. This debate provides a significant opening to focus the nation and its political leaders on how to promote the long-term well-being of all American households, including not only the welfare poor but also the millions of working families only a step or two away from official poverty. The authors contend that a new approach to domestic policy is needed, one built on the promise of "asset development" as the way to insure a secure future for the nation's families, including its most vulnerable.
Asset development policies can provide people more economic security while also enabling them to enjoy economic mobility; are likely to be attractive to a wide cross-section of the political spectrum; and can be the basis for a new consensus on how to enable low-income families to prosper. This essay offers encouragement and guidance to readers on how consensus might be reached on the new policy opportunity asset development provides.
This article introduces the concept and promise of asset development for promoting greater economic security and opportunity among low-income households. It sets forth a domestic policy vision that has the capacity to help re-frame the way that we look at poverty, think about opportunity, and fashion public policy.
© 2012, Institute on Assets and Social Policy, The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. All rights are reserved.
