10/11/2026
The irony is painful.
A Black HUD secretary, Scott Turner, is leading an investigation into Wells Fargo’s programs intended to increase Black homeownership. HUD says those efforts may violate fair-housing law. Turner has condemned the bank’s approach even while acknowledging that it may not have violated the law. (hud.gov)
How do we address generations of housing discrimination if efforts to repair that damage are themselves treated as the problem?
America’s barriers to Black ownership stretch from slavery through generations of discriminatory policies and practices. Remember this history:
• Sharecropping and debt traps: After emancipation, many Black families remained tied to landowners through exploitative arrangements that made financial independence and landownership extraordinarily difficult. (archives.gov)
• Redlining and discriminatory FHA policies: Federal mortgage-insurance practices and private lenders shut Black neighborhoods out of affordable financing—even when individual borrowers were qualified. (federalreservehistory.org)
• Unequal access to GI Bill and VA-backed home loans: Black veterans served their country, then encountered discriminatory lending and segregated housing markets that prevented many from receiving the homeownership opportunities available to white veterans. (investopedia.com)
• Racially restrictive covenants and neighborhood exclusion: Deed restrictions and organized neighborhood associations were used to keep Black families from buying or occupying homes in white communities. (federalreservehistory.org, files.consumerfinance.gov)
• Predatory contract buying: Families excluded from conventional mortgages were sold homes at inflated prices under contracts that withheld ownership and could leave them losing both the home and everything they had paid. (files.consumerfinance.gov)
• Urban renewal and highway construction: Government projects demolished Black homes and businesses, displaced families, and disrupted opportunities to pass property and wealth to the next generation. (habitat.org)
And Wells Fargo’s own history matters. In 2012, the Justice Department announced a settlement providing more than $175 million in relief to resolve allegations that the bank charged Black and Hispanic borrowers more or steered them into subprime mortgages despite their qualifications. (justice.gov)
Today, federal policy has moved in the opposite direction: a rule effective July 21, 2026, prohibits for-profit special-purpose credit programs from using race as an eligibility criterion. That is a specific restriction—not a declaration that every effort to expand access is illegal. (federalregister.gov)
Equality promises a fair opportunity. Equity requires confronting the barriers that have kept that promise out of reach. Access means families can actually walk through the door.
We cannot erase the consequences of generations of exclusion simply by refusing to acknowledge race.
Fair housing should mean a meaningful opportunity to purchase a home, build stability, and leave something for the next generation. That promise belongs to Black Americans, too.
