Growing Wealth, Inequality, and Housing in the United States

W07-1: The rapid growth of household wealth in the United States has been accompanied by drastic growing inequality. This paper discusses both wealth and inequality growth, examines demographic factors behind the growth, and analyzes housing’s role in it, using the Survey of Consumer Finances data collected by the Federal Reserve Bank. While aggregate household net wealth grew from $25.9 trillion in 1995 to $50.1 trillion in 2004 (both in 2004 dollars), nearly 90 percent of the net gains occurred only among the top quartile of households in the wealth distribution. Although housing wealth (both home equity and housing value) was still more evenly distributed than other types of wealth, it largely served to widen the wealth gap rather than to narrow it during the last decade…