Toxic Inequality by Thomas M. Shapiro

Author:Thomas M. Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

CARLINE CLARK’S FAMILY, HAVING INHERITED WELL OVER $1 million with more to come, is certainly not typical. Of the one in three white families fortunate enough to inherit, the median inheritance is much lower, around $84,000. But as the story of the Mills family suggests, an inheritance closer to this more typical figure can greatly impact a family’s trajectory and transform lives.

We sat down with Blake and Andrea Mills in 1998 and 2010 in an upmarket section of Redondo Beach, once part of a 48,000-acre land grant from the Spanish government to the Dominguez family in 1822. During the Mexican-American War, US Marines laid siege to the Dominguez ranchero in 1848 and were driven back to their ships in the nearby harbor.14 Today, it is one of Los Angeles’s most highly coveted beach communities, a place where shoeless preppies sip espressos and gaze at the Pacific Ocean on gorgeous California days, most likely oblivious of the history of the ground they stand on. The story of this place, of how property was titled and transferred through land grants, wars, seizures, and court battles between feuding pioneer families, then subdivided, sold to aviation industry workers during World War II, and eventually gentrified—this is the sweeping arc of history in its repeated interactions with individual families’ circumstances.

Much as King Charles III of Spain bequeathed land rights to a chosen elite, Blake’s parents anchored his family in Redondo Beach with a large gift. Blake and Andrea in all probability could not have afforded to purchase their home on their own, even with their very good family income of $97,000. Rather, inheritance placed them and their two sons in one of California’s best-resourced, most educationally rich school districts.

In the early 1990s Blake and Andrea were living in a South Bay apartment in an area they liked a lot. Blake’s father proposed that they buy a place in Redondo Beach together. Blake agreed, and father and son became co-owners of a townhouse. Eventually Blake’s father took himself off the deed, giving Blake and Andrea sole ownership. Blake says that the copurchase of the home was a way for his parents to “help us out and get started, so to speak.” In the initial purchase of the townhouse and during their co-ownership, Blake’s family gave them approximately $90,000 to $100,000 toward the house. Blake’s family got a tax break as co-owners. Blake says he could not have purchased the townhouse without what he called an “interesting arrangement” with his father. “They actually threw money, as a stipend, to us. And then for money that they gave us, we gave them back tax shelter, tax advantages as co-owners.”

Blake acknowledged that family financial help and his parents’ cosigning of the mortgage were indispensable to getting them started. I asked Blake in 1998 the impolite question of how much money they had inherited already. “It’s a horrendous number, it’s scary. I’m guessing between ninety and a hundred thousand dollars.”

By 2000 their young boys were growing, and like most growing

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