• Michigan lawmakers have proposed a commission to study reparations and racial disparities
  • The three-bill package focuses on addressing housing, education and economic inequities, not cash payments 
  • Critics question costs, feasibility and the government’s role in reparations

Michigan lawmakers are proposing a new approach to addressing the state’s longstanding racial wealth gap: studying reparations.

A three-bill package introduced by the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus would create an Office of Freedmen Affairs, establish a commission to study reparations and recommend remedies and improve state data collection on descendants of enslaved people.

Sponsors of the legislation stressed the “reparative justice” bills would not necessarily result in cash payments. Instead, they are intended to examine how past and present policies have harmed communities and identify ways to address those inequities. 

“This legislation is really studying ways to address some of those disparities, whether we’re talking about disparities in housing due to redlining, disparities in education, disparities in the criminal justice system,” said state Rep. Jason Hoskins, D-Southfield, one of the sponsors of the legislation. “The reason why we’re doing it now is that now is always a good time to address injustice.” 

The package has been sent to the House Committee on Government Operations, where the committee chair says the legislation isn’t one of his priorities. 

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“I have concerns that legislation like this could end up dividing people based on ancestry or race instead of bringing people together around common goals,” state Rep. Brian BeGole, R-Perry, told Bridge Michigan in a statement. 

“If we’re going to address disparities, I’d rather do it by expanding opportunities for all through better schools, workforce development, homeownership and a stronger economy,” he said. 

Supporters say the legislation is intended to examine how generations of discriminatory policies continue to affect Black Michiganders today. One of the clearest examples is homeownership: About 79% of white Michiganders own their homes, compared to 48% of Black residents, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The story is the same across the country. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the US homeownership rate was 65.4% in the first quarter of 2026, but the rate was 75% for white households, compared to 44% for Black households.

The percentage of Black Michiganders owning a home has been on a steady incline since 2016, when less than 40% were homeowners. 

Even so, wealth disparities still exist. The Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances found that, while racial wealth gaps narrowed slightly between 2019 and 2022, large disparities remain.

The typical white family held about six times the wealth of the typical Black family and five times the wealth of the typical Hispanic family, even as homeownership, stock ownership and business ownership grew faster among non-white households during that period.

A broader approach

The legislation comes just months after Detroit’s reparations task force provided recommendations to the City Council specifically addressing inequities in housing and economic development. 

Some of that task force’s recommendations include financial assistance for home repairs, grants specifically for businesses that were displaced in the city’s Black Bottom neighborhood and building more affordable housing units. 

It’s important for any reparations task force to really look at what the state and local agencieshave done to “create and continue racial discrimination,” said Sam Stragand, senior program manager for Poverty Solutions’ Detroit Partnership on Economic Mobility. “That won’t get everyone on board but it connects the dots between the racist thing that was done wrong and it led to this type of inequality.” 

Stragand, who worked with Detroit’s reparations task force, said focusing on specific government discriminatory policies helps identify concrete historical harms, rather than broadly characterizing a city or state as “a racist place to live.”

Why wealth gaps persist

For many middle-class families, the most accessible path to creating generational wealth is through homeownership. Supporters say disparities on that front did not emerge by accident.

A lot of Black Americans missed out on the post-World War II house-buying boom and the ones who were able to buy houses often did so under more precarious and expensive circumstances than White Americans, Carolyn Loh, associate professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State University, told Bridge Michigan. 

The Home Owners’ Loan Corp., a federal agency created under then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, sought to refinance struggling mortgages and stabilize the real estate market but unintentionally popularized “redlining,” a discriminatory practice in which color-coded maps were used by banks and private lenders to determine who to give mortgages to. 

Those maps were created for many major cities and all had one thing in common: Predominantly Black neighborhoods closest to the city were deemed “hazardous” or “declining,” while suburban neighborhoods mostly occupied by white families were deemed “best” or “desirable.” 

Reparations in practice

While programs exist to encourage homeownership like downpayment assistance and fixed-rate mortgages for first-time buyers, Black homeownership has seen the least growth when compared to Hispanic and Asian Americans, the study by the National Association of Realtors found. 

“Sometimes you need to approach an equity-related policy from a more oblique angle,” Loh, of Wayne State, said. “The amazing thing that (lawmakers) must pull off is convincing people that these equity measures don’t make anyone’s life worse; they don’t take away anything; they just make the pie bigger.” 

Those political hurdles have already played out elsewhere. Lawmakers in California struggled to advance several recommendations from the state’s reparations task force after Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed five reparative justice bills, citing fiscal constraints and legal concerns.

The vetoed measures included proposals to allow public colleges to give admissions preference to descendants of enslaved Americans and to create a process for compensating people whose property was seized through racially motivated eminent domain.

Still, the state has moved forward on other recommendations. In October, California established the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery to build the state’s reparations framework. 

Lawmakers also allocated $6 million to the California State University system to develop methods for verifying descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States, one of more than 100 recommendations issued by the task force.

While California was the first state to establish a reparations task force, Evanston, Illinois became the first US city to implement a reparations program. Rather than issuing direct cash payments, the city offers up to $25,000 in housing assistance through its Restorative Housing Program, funded by local cannabis tax revenue

“Sometimes when people think of reparative justice or reparations, they sometimes think of it as just giving someone a check and sending them on their way, but I can see it being done in a number of ways,” said Hoskins, the Michigan state lawmaker. 

Reparations could look like down payment assistance, creating tax credits that incentivize home ownership or expanding existing programs for first-time homebuyers, he added. 

Evanston’s program now faces a legal challenge. In June, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division intervened in a class-action lawsuit alleging the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.

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