LAWRENCE, Indiana — Brian Penn has lived in his Lawrence neighborhood for eight years. He not only maintains his own property, but the yards of many neighbors, too.
It’s a point of pride for him.
"Especially in a community that's on the rise,” Penn said.
Property values are rising fast in his neighborhood and across the entire state. Overall, homes in Indiana have increased in price by 42% since 2020, according to the Indiana Business Review.
"Home values are exponentially growing for homeowners,” said Rochelle Perkins, a realtor who’s been selling homes here for nearly a decade. "(I’ve seen) double, in some areas, triple, which is amazing.”
Nonprofit news organization Stateline identified the 46235 zip code as one of 92 majority-Black zip codes in the U.S. “where home values have increased since 2016 after losing value earlier in the 2000s.”
Lawrence home values increased 105% in that time in a study that examined data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It used "sales of similar properties — so-called matched pairs — to estimate price changes over time. U.S. Census Bureau were used to find zip codes where most homeowners are Black.”
Nationwide, home values increased by 84% on average in majority-Black zip codes between 2016 and 2023. They grew by only 69% in mostly white zip codes.
Fair housing advocates call it much-needed progress to help close a glaring gap in racial wealth. In America, most of our wealth has traditionally come from owning real estate, but that's historically been more difficult for communities of color. First with redlining, and more recently with appraisal bias.
In 2022, the White House announced plans to diversify the group of people who appraise homes, provide better access to data to better value those homes and give consumers more power to fight back.
Morgan Williams, chief legal counsel for the National Fair Housing Alliance, said reforms that came to bank lenders years ago are now coming to the appraisal industry.
“The prevalence of market data the industry is increasingly relying upon is automated valuation models to complement what human appraisers are doing in applying compliance monitoring approaches and ultimately minimizing bias,” Williams said.
Perkins said she believes a housing shortage is also playing a role.
“It’s a beautiful thing to see the wealth gap closing,” Perkins said. “Hopefully, there is still plenty of work to do, very large strides to make. But any movement in that gap, to see it start so close here in my hometown, is beautiful.”
It's all to make sure the American dream is a dream for all Americans.