Home, work and money

In the working years an address shows up as an asset, as a price and as a labor market, and each measures something different. A median home value can indicate the wealth of the people who own homes in an area and also the cost of getting in. The earnings of an area's residents are a second thing again, because residents can work outside the county where they live. The chapters describe counties, census tracts and the sites where eviction filings are tracked, and none describes any one household.

Chapter 5.1, Work, wages and access to jobs keeps residents and workplaces apart. In the counties with the fewest local jobs per job held by residents, the jobs residents hold and the jobs located there differ in their share in the top earnings band, so what residents earn and what local employers pay describe different jobs.

Chapter 5.2, Home value, income and redlining finds that life expectancy is higher where homes are worth more, whether each census tract counts once or in proportion to its population, and that tracts graded A on the Home Owners' Loan Corporation maps of the 1930s have a longer life expectancy than tracts graded D. The slope describes places and does not say that a household that moved to a costlier area would live longer. The residents of an area differ from people who move in income, health and age, and the data cannot separate that selection from what an area provides. Surveyors graded areas on housing, incomes and race, so the comparisons cannot separate the effect of the maps from the neighborhoods the maps graded.

Chapter 5.3, Mortgage denials reads the home-purchase applications that lenders decided in 2024 and finds denial rates higher in more deprived tracts. In the tracts with published rates for both groups, non-Hispanic Black applicants were denied more often than non-Hispanic white applicants. The tract file holds no credit scores or debts, so the gaps are not estimates of discrimination.

Chapter 5.4, Renting, affordability and eviction turns to renters. Renter households are cost-burdened more often than owner households, a gap the chapter finds at low and moderate incomes and not above them, and within a county the renter burden is higher in more deprived tracts. The chapter then follows eviction filings in the cities that the Eviction Lab tracks, each tract against its own level before the pandemic. Filings are not completed evictions, and the tracked sites are not a national sample.