An enormous entitlement in the tax code props up home prices — and overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy and the upper middle class. - The New York Times

One of the consequences of housing segregation in America - particularly in the mass migration to the suburbs in the post-war 1950's - is that  Black people were excluded from buying houses.  As massive suburbs like Levittown became mature communities they became the source of much wealth.  By the time of the Fair Housing Act of 1965 the damage was largely already done.  It would be followed by accelerated white flight from cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, and the Bronx. 
The wealth building mechanism receives government support via the mortgage interest deduction which subsidizes upper middle income families like the Asares, pictured above.  
- gwc
How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality - The New York Times
by Matthew Desmond
***Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations. The standard of “affordable” housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family’s income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent. Yet America’s national housing policy gives affluent homeowners large benefits; middle-class homeowners, smaller benefits; and most renters, who are disproportionately poor, nothing. It is difficult to think of another social policy that more successfully multiplies America’s inequality in such a sweeping fashion.***

An enormous entitlement in the tax
code props up home prices — and
overwhelmingly benefits the
wealthy and the upper middle class.

BY MATTHEW DESMONDMAY 9, 2017