A DECADE AFTER a Boston Fed report found the median Black household in the Boston area had a net worth of $8, a recent statewide survey from the bank offers some improvement, with a caveat. Median wealth for Black families in Massachusetts is now $7,800, still dwarfed by a median $549,200 for white families.

The 2015 report was narrowly focused on Boston households. Even for long-time advocates, it offered a bracing assessment of disparities in the city.

Sharon Scott-Chandler, president and CEO of the antipoverty organization Action for Boston Community Development, or ABCD, said her reaction 10 years ago was, “shock, disbelief.”

“And that’s coming from someone who, first of all, grew up in Mattapan,” she told CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith on The Codcast. “So I have experienced poverty, but it was just a disbelief that the disparity could be so wide.”

The new survey, which drew 5,018 responses in 2025, found a statewide median family net wealth of $374,000. Hispanic families held even less median wealth than Black families in the survey — just $1,200.

Scott-Chandler said the result “mirrors a reality we see every day, which is which is Black and brown people have not only less income but less wealth, less fallback, less assets — those things that define not only what your present life is in and what condition that may be, but how you can survive tomorrow, how you can survive next year, and how that general generational wealth can change.”

Just over 35 percent of families statewide could not cover an unexpected $400 expense with cash or its equivalent, the report found, a share that rose to 50.1 percent in Gateway Cities.

Scott-Chandler said that short-term gap is one reason organizations like ABCD exist. When the government shut down in 2025, she said, “people didn’t have an extra $400 to go to the grocery store.” They ended up at food access centers.

The wealth gap measurements include retirement and educational accounts, securities, and other investments. But homeownership remains a major factor. Homeowners had a median family net wealth of $790,500, compared with $1,500 for renters.

The state’s crippling housing shortage has left families who might usually be eyeing a home competing in the rental market instead, driving up rents and pushing homeownership further out of reach. Scott-Chandler’s parents were once able to buy a small home for just $20,000 in Mattapan.

“That’s just out of this world in terms of what people can access in any neighborhood of Boston,” she said. “And a decade later from the first study, we don’t have any more tools in that toolbox for home ownership and housing that we really need.”

She also pointed to the foreclosure crisis, scams, and high-interest loans, which Black and brown families are susceptible to “more often and at deeper scopes than white families.”

“There’s so much that can still be done, and I think it’s not an ‘either, or’ — it’s an ‘and,’” Scott-Chandler said. Targeted programs could work to reduce the number of households without an emergency $400, she said, but “a family without liquid savings has to make incredible choices around food or heat or things like that.” She cited free tax preparation and the federal Earned Income Tax Credit as ways to put “hard-earned money back into their pockets,” which families often use to pay off debt.

The systemic fixes take more time, she noted, and will need to involve financial education about retirement, different savings options, and debt reduction. But people are rowing against tides of inflation, slow wage growth, and skyrocketing cost of living.

This time around, Scott-Chandler was not surprised by the Boston Fed’s findings.

“The circumstances are very much out of their control because people are working hard,” she said. “We see it every day. They’re working hard and just can’t make ends meet and can’t get ahead.”

On the episode, they discuss what the report found for Black and Hispanic families (4:30), why a $400 expense can become a crisis (10:30), and what progress could look like in the next decade (32:15).