On Our Radar

A federal program to encourage black homeownership in the 1970s ended in a flood of foreclosures.

The gap between the richest and the poorest U.S. households is now the largest it’s been in the past 50 years — despite the median U.S. income hitting a new record in 2018, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The asset-light consumer’s behavior remains largely untested in a downturn—a rising risk—that could hold nasty surprises.

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s plan to push affordable housing into affluent neighborhoods drew applause but also sparked warnings that it would face opposition from communities that have long resisted subsidized housing.

The Commerce Department is developing a methodology for compiling and publishing regular statistics on inequality and plans to publish its prototype measures in 2020.

If you tally all of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences in history, awards have been given to only 21 women, or 3% of the 700 laureates.

The economists find that dwindling competition has cost the country approximately 150,000 additional homes a year.

Extreme inequality is troubling both because it fosters gross and wasteful consumption and because it undermines the principle of political equality: Nearly unencumbered transfers of wealth permitted under current law perpetuate those imbalances, creating dynasties of the rich and hampering economic and social mobility.

Tens of thousands of people have received demands to repay alleged overpayments of government benefits – often decades old – plunging them into a Kafkaesque struggle against a faceless bureaucracy.

The goal, officials say, is to correct a history of “racially discriminatory” housing policy.

Megacities are too costly and seem immune to reform, while rural America is depopulating and lacks resources.

Proposals that base their remedies primarily on formerly redlined areas do not redress the main racial group that was explicitly targeted.

Scarce, unaffordable housing is not a local problem in a few places, but is baked into the 21st-century global city. And it’s worst in the developing world.

Shaker Heights, Ohio, has been a national model for racial integration for decades. Tackling academic disparities between Black and White students has proven far tougher.

The Trump administration blocked the nation’s top consumer protection agency from digging into problems with a program designed to help police, firefighters and other public service workers.