The 2015 report highlighting wealth inequities between Black and white households sure got the city talking.
The attention-grabbing finding, shared by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, that the typical household led by a US-born Black in metro Boston had $8 in wealth compared to nearly $250,000 for white households was a stark illustration of the disparity. But it wasn’t exactly great statistical science: Only around 70 US-born Blacks were surveyed, and around 400 households in total.
On Wednesday, the Boston Fed released a far more substantial report, one that involved more than 5,000 households across the state. To pull off this research, the Fed needed $2.3 million in outside funding to pay for the survey work by consultancy Mathematica.
Several sponsors that had approached the Fed made it happen. The Barr Foundation kicked in $1.3 million, while The Boston Foundation provided $450,000 and handled the contract with Mathematica, according to Keith Mahoney at TBF. The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and Eastern Bank each chipped in $250,000. Mahoney also said a city resiliency fund established by then-mayor Marty Walsh with private donations during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic provided another $65,000.
The bottom line: Things haven’t changed all that much from 2015. The wealth gap remains huge between white ($549,000 in net wealth) and Black families ($7,800), though it’s even more pronounced when comparing homeowners ($790,000) to renters ($1,500), or households led by Latinos ($1,200) to white families.
“We were not expecting the report would yield different results in terms of inequity,” said Eastern executive chair Bob Rivers. “I’m fine with updating the study ... to give it more credibility but believed the answers were going to be fundamentally the same.”
Jim Rooney, chief executive of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, said the report’s findings reinforced that homeownership is a big driver of wealth here, and making it easier for people to achieve that should remain a chamber priority. “Do we need yet another reason to double down on housing production?” Rooney said.
The work, to some extent, can be traced back to a 2015 meeting at McKenna’s in Savin Hill between Rooney and Walsh. Over breakfast, they lamented Boston’s racial wealth gap and vowed to put City Hall and the chamber to work to address it. Walsh, for example, then brought on Karilyn Crockett as the city’s first chief of equity. And Rooney later launched the Pacesetters program connecting small-business contractors with large enterprises in need of their services.
Separately, the 2015 report spurred civic leaders to create the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts and prompted Eastern to launch a business equity fund through its foundation.
Through it all, though, the hope for more thorough research continued. Finally, following the racial reckoning and the Black Lives Matter protests early in the pandemic, the Boston Fed and the report sponsors got to work in 2022. By that point, Crockett had left City Hall to teach at MIT, and was working with the chamber on a consulting basis.
The initial budget for the report was set at $1.5 million. But costs grew as the parameters expanded, and both the Barr and Boston foundations kicked in more money.
“The fact there were more than 5,000 households that participated in this, that’s a great indication of people’s willingness to share their personal and financial data,” Crockett said. “We now have a snapshot of how households are doing in terms of their wealth, in terms of their economic status.”
Lee Pelton had also made a push for the 2015 report to be revisited after he became president of The Boston Foundation in 2021. The timing of the report’s release is good for Pelton, as he plan to retire at the end of this month, though Mahoney says it’s purely a coincidence.
The big question hanging over everyone: What’s next?
Rivers, for one, can’t help but admit frustration that more hasn’t been done to address wealth inequity since the 2015 report. He hopes this time will be different.
“I think the last time we missed the moment,” Rivers said. “We shouldn’t miss the moment again.”
This is an installment of our weekly Bold Types column about the movers and shakers on Boston’s business scene.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.