A recent report published by the Pew Research Center revealed that black and Hispanic households were hit the hardest by the recession, causing the greatest disparity in wealth between the United States' largest minority groups and white households. In the four-year span between 2005 and 2009, the median wealth of Hispanic households fell by 66 percent, while black households' wealth declined by 53 percent. However, the wealth of white households only fell by 16 percent during that time (Eichler). .
In other terms, median wealth - assets minus debts - greatly differed for the three ethnic groups. Black households had $5,677 in wealth on average, Hispanic households had $6,325, and white households average $113,149 in wealth. Furthermore, unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics rose at a faster pace than for whites, according to a study by the Center for American Progress. At the same time, median family income was declining faster for the minority groups than for whites (The Huffington Post). .
"The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times of Hispanic households," wrote a market analyst (Chung). .
While these reports revealed some startling figures, they also provided a few reasons for the discrepancies between blacks and Hispanics and whites. The recession greatly affected industries that typically employed Hispanics, including construction and manufacturing. Also, Hispanics heavily populated parts of the country that suffered the most from the recession, like California, Nevada, and Florida (The Huffington Post). These areas received the brunt of the suffering because their house values dropped drastically (Chung). .
"Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic household wealth in 2005 was derived from owned homes," revealed one report. Naturally, the drop in the housing market affected Latinos greatly (Costa). .
Rakesh Kochhar, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Hispanic Center, agreed, "Hispanics are more affected by the downturn because they were more exposed to the bubble simply because of the geography, partly because they actually followed the housing bubble for construction jobs," he said.
