New Report: N.J.’s Racial Wealth Gap Tops $600K

New Jersey’s already stark racial wealth divide is widening into what researchers are calling a “racial wealth gap disaster,” with the typical white family now holding more than double the wealth gap the state faced a decade ago.

In a new report, “The Two New Jerseys: The Deepening Divide,” the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice warns that the state’s racial inequities in wealth, homeownership, income and basic protections like health insurance have grown more severe, even as New Jersey remains one of the richest states in the country.

The Institute first described New Jersey as a modern-day version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Two Americas” in an earlier analysis, when the racial wealth gap stood at roughly $300,000. In the updated report, the authors note that this gap has now doubled, writing that “we now live in two New Jerseys that are even further apart.” 

Those gains have flowed largely to households with home equity and substantial savings, who are disproportionately white, while Black and Latina/o residents remain locked out of homeownership and the chance to build generational wealth.

The report traces the divide back to New Jersey’s origins as a slaveholding colony, arguing that today’s disparities are the predictable result of centuries of policy choices rather than individual failings. 

It points to a “direct line” from colonial land giveaways to white families, who were granted 150 acres plus another 150 acres for each enslaved Black person they brought, to modern patterns of exclusion in housing, credit and public investment. The report says that New Jersey “designed it this way during its founding as a colony and has never confronted, let alone, repaired that harm.”

Even recent crises, the report says, have reinforced rather than reduced inequality. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the virus became the leading cause of death for Black residents in 2020, the state had a chance to pursue reparative policies and long-term protections for Black communities. 

Instead, lawmakers moved quickly to pass the Economic Recovery Act of 2020, including $14 billion in corporate tax breaks that advocacy groups warned would “eclipse critical funding needs for Black people in this state.” The Institute faults the state for failing to fully tackle housing affordability or adopt structural tools such as reparations and Baby Bonds that could meaningfully narrow the gap.

The central argument of the report is that New Jersey’s problem is not a lack of money, but how power and policy decide who benefits. 

“As one of America’s wealthiest states, New Jersey’s challenge is not one of resources,” the authors write. “Rather, it is that the state has designed a racialized system that determines who gets access to our wealth.” 

While acknowledging wins such as a $15 minimum wage, first-generation homeownership programs and action on racially biased home appraisals, the report concludes that “so much more remains to be done to establish a foundation of racial equity in our state.”

The Institute frames this moment as both precarious and full of possibility, with a new presidential administration it says is “determined to roll back key civil rights progress” and a pivotal election season in New Jersey reshaping state leadership. 

The report closes by urging policymakers and residents to seize the opportunity to “harness our collective power” and advance a vision in which Black and Latino people—and all New Jerseyans—are fully connected to the state’s prosperity. 

That, the authors argue, will require confronting the “two New Jerseys” head-on and rewriting the rules that have made extreme racial inequality a defining feature of the Garden State.