Columbus is growing by leaps and bounds. So why is it 700 years behind in racial equality?
A study shows that it will take Black Columbus residents 700 years to get opportunities to improve their wealth and quality of life equal to their white neighbors.
On average, it will take Black Americans 300 years to catch up, said Duwain Pinder, a partner at the Columbus office of consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which did the research released earlier this year.
So why the 400-year difference for Columbus? Pinder said centuries of discrimination have caused huge differences in how much residents of each race earn annually in Columbus, whether or not they own a home, what level of education they receive and what opportunities they can access.
To arrive at the gap between races in different American cities, the study analyzed how all residents fared when it comes to standards of living, financial stability, quality education, stable homes, and job and skills development opportunities.
“Our gaps are larger than other places,” Pinder said, and they’re widening as the pace of progress for Black Columbus residents remains slow. “Columbus is growing economically; it’s thriving, but that growth is not being equally distributed.”
Columbus also wasn’t having “real conversations” about race and equity when other cities were, said Stephanie Hightower, president and CEO of the Columbus Urban League, who said she wasn’t shocked by how long it will take for Black Columbus residents to catch up.
Those conversations didn’t really start locally until after the murder of George Floyd Jr. in May 2020 by since-convicted Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and three other officers that sparked social justice protests against police brutality and calls for racial equality, she said.
“Other communities had already started having those conversations, and they weren’t just sweeping things under the rug,” Hightower said. “Ours got exposed during COVID and George Floyd. That’s why I think we’re still behind.”
It doesn’t help that Columbus’ zoning code hasn’t been updated since the 1950s, said Anna Teye-Kasongo, director of community partnerships at the Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio (AHACO).
“If you think about the priorities of the 1950s, segregation and sprawl were priorities,” she said.
But Columbus’ Zone-In zoning overhaul should help the city make headway on this issue and could create more than 80,000 new homes, Teye-Kasongo said.
How housing can help Columbus narrow the gap
The massive racial gap in prosperity is something that society created and, therefore, will take everyone to fix — and should be done sooner than the seven centuries it would take based on current conditions, Teye-Kasongo said.
This disparity is closely tied to the gap in homeownership between Black and white residents, she said.
“In Franklin County alone, Black families are 32% less likely to own a home than their white counterparts,” Teye-Kasongo said. “No matter where you go in our city, you have more white families able to unlock home ownership.”
One part of the solution would be to help Black residents become homeowners, she said.
Redlining and restrictive covenants denied homeownership to Black residents and others in specific areas of the city beginning in the 1930s, putting Black families behind when it comes to building home equity and generational wealth.
