Landownership in the US is highly unequal and highly racialized. Nationally, the top 1 percent of households owns an estimated 40 percent of non-home real estate, and the top 10 (all white) agricultural landowners in the US together own more agricultural land than all racial minorities in the US combined (Gilbert 2002, Fisher 2010). What we know about inequality in landownership though is limited, either to the national level or to agricultural land – no subnational estimates for urban and suburban, or residential and commercial, lands exist, despite suggestive evidence that landownership inequality in large cities may be even more severe than it is nationally (Wolff 2017). Understanding the scope of local landownership inequality in the US is important though because land accounts for most of the increase in American wealth inequality seen in recent decades, and accounts for a third of the racial wealth gap (Rognlie 2015, Sullivan et al 2015). My HMUI-funded work estimates the level of landownership inequality in US counties, documenting how much of the land (in aggregate, and disaggregated by land use type) is held by how few (in aggregate, and disaggregated by landowner race and gender). Ultimately, I hope to make progress toward the question: “why are some places in the US more unequal than others, and to what effect on the communities that inhabit them?”
Fisher, Daniel. (2010). In Pictures: America's Top 10 Landowners. Forbes, online. https://www.forbes.com/2010/06/14/ted-turner john-malone-emmerson-business-billionaires-land_slide.html#9d886682d98c.
Gilbert, Jess, Spencer D. Wood, and Gwen Sharp. (2002). Who Owns the Land? Current Agricultural Land Ownership by Race/Ethnicity. Rural America, 17(4): 55-62.
Rognlie, Matthew. (2015). Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share: Accumulation or Scarcity? Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 46(1): 1-69.
Sullivan, Laura, Tatjana Meschede, Lars Dietrich, Thomas Shapiro, Amy Traub, Catharine Reutschlin, and Tamara Draut. (2015). The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters. Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy, Brandeis University, Policy Report.
Wolff, Edward N. (2017). Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2016: Has Middle Class Wealth Recovered? NBER Working Paper No. 24085.
Researcher: Jacob Waggoner