From Disparity to Prosperity: Addressing the Black Wealth Gap in Sacramento

In this RW Ventures-led project for the City of Sacramento, Mass Economics and its sister data company, data-Fab, constructed, analyzed, and mapped a broad set of data to measure racial (and spatial) inequalities and the racial wealth gap in Sacramento over time and place – i.e., within the city and region – contextualized within statewide and national trends. Data created for this effort included datasets that allowed for the direct crosstabulation of the variables of interest by race/ethnicity but also required Mass Economics to geographically “cross-pollinate” datasets in order understand disparities across race/ethnicity. For example, by linking data on capital flows at the Census tract level to the resident characteristics of those Census tracts, the project team was able to tell stories about capital flows to majority minority or disproportionately Black/African American neighborhoods. Key measures analyzed across race/ethnicity include: the inclusivity and wage disparities of industries, entrepreneurial activity, geographic access to capital providers (e.g., banks), capital flows (to both small businesses and farms), business and farm ownership, and dozens of demographic and socioeconomic variables from the ACS and ACS-Integrated Public Use Microsample data (e.g., middle class households, home values, housing cost burden, sources of income). Mass Economics then worked with RW Ventures to incorporate the findings from our analytics and co-develop myriad strategies to help address the Black wealth gap in Sacramento into the report “From Disparity to Prosperity: Addressing the Black Wealth Gap in Sacramento” (available here https://tinyurl.com/SacBlackWealth).