Contemporary young people should find it easy to understand how this worked and how housing discrimination prevented wealth building. That's because the same th

Contemporary young people should find it easy to understand how this worked and how housing discrimination prevented wealth building. That's because the same thing is now kind of happening intergenerationally via older NIMBY homeowners restricting supply and driving prices to unattainable heights. "Generational redlining" is of course an unintended consequence rather than an intentional policy, but the nature of the effect is illustrative and could serve as a teaching moment. Good or bad, homeownership is a major way people build wealth in our society. Being excluded from it prevents you from building wealth. Take the outrage that many younger people feel about generational exclusion from homeownership and then realize that until relatively recently blacks were systematically excluded in much more explicit ways: exclusion from loans, red lining, etc. The effects were the same: no equity, no ability to escape increasing rent, family instability.