“Who Gets to Grow With Chattanooga?”
By Dr. Ernest L. Reid, Jr
There is no question that Chattanooga is growing.
Drive through our city and the evidence is everywhere. New apartments are rising. Restaurants are opening. Downtown continues to develop. Neighborhoods once overlooked are attracting investment. People from across the country are discovering what those of us who have lived here for generations already knew: Chattanooga is a beautiful place with enormous potential.
But there is another question we must be willing to ask:
As Chattanooga grows, are Black Chattanoogans growing with it?
Growth and progress are not necessarily the same thing. A city can grow economically while some of its longtime residents lose ground. Property values can increase while families can no longer afford the neighborhoods they helped build. New businesses can open while household wealth remains stagnant. Development can come to a community without the people who have lived there sharing meaningfully in that development.
Housing provides one of the clearest examples.
According to the City of Chattanooga’s Housing for One Chattanooga: Housing Action Plan, prepared by HR&A Advisors, Black homeownership in Chattanooga declined from 42 percent in 2011 to 37 percent in 2021. During that same period, white homeownership declined from 64 percent to 61 percent, leaving a 24-percentage-point gap between Black and white homeownership rates.
The same City report found another troubling disparity: 52 percent of Black renters were housing-cost burdened in 2021, meaning they were spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Among white renters, the comparable figure was 39 percent.
The disparities do not end there.
Using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data from 2018 through 2021, Chattanooga’s Housing Action Plan found that Black mortgage applicants earning between $100,000 and $150,000 experienced a 12 percent mortgage-denial rate, compared with just 4 percent for white applicants in that same income range.
Even more striking, the report found that the 12 percent denial rate for Black applicants earning $100,000–$150,000 was higher than the 9 percent denial rate for white applicants earning just $35,000–$50,000.
Those numbers should concern all of Chattanooga.
Homeownership is about more than having somewhere to live. For generations, owning a home has been one of America’s primary mechanisms for building wealth. A house becomes equity. Equity can help finance a child’s education, provide security during retirement, fund a business and eventually become an inheritance.
When Black homeownership declines, therefore, we are not simply losing houses. We are losing opportunities to transfer wealth from one generation to another.
There is also a historical dimension to this conversation. Chattanooga’s Housing Action Plan explicitly connects lower Black homeownership and the racial wealth gap to decades of systemic discrimination and redlining that limited Black families’ access to homeownership and wealth-building opportunities.
That history cannot be changed. But Chattanooga can decide what happens next.
In April 2026, the City of Chattanooga announced a new Down Payment Assistance Program providing eligible first-time homebuyers with up to $15,000 in City assistance. Through a partnership with the Tennessee Housing Development Agency, eligible buyers may receive up to $21,000 in combined assistance. That is an important step toward helping working families overcome the upfront costs of homeownership.
But government programs alone will not solve the problem.
This conversation must also take place around our kitchen tables, inside our churches, within our businesses and among our young adults.
We must teach financial literacy before adulthood. We must talk seriously about credit, saving, investing and homeownership. We must encourage Black entrepreneurship and intentionally support Black-owned businesses. Families that own property need wills and estate plans so that property accumulated by one generation is not unnecessarily lost by the next.
Our churches also have a role beyond Sunday morning. Historically, the Black church was not simply a place of worship. It was an institution around which Black communities organized, educated, saved, advocated and built. There is room again for churches to host homebuyer workshops, financial-literacy classes, entrepreneurship programs and estate-planning seminars.
I welcome Chattanooga’s growth. I want cranes in the sky, businesses opening, neighborhoods improving and new families choosing our city.
But twenty years from now, I also want to see Black families who can say, “We didn’t just watch Chattanooga prosper. We participated in its prosperity.”
Because the measure of a great city cannot simply be how much it grows.
The deeper measure is who gets to grow with it.
Sources: City of Chattanooga, Housing for One Chattanooga: Housing Action Plan, HR&A Advisors, 2023, particularly pp. 14 and 94; Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data, 2018–2021, as analyzed in the Housing Action Plan; City of Chattanooga Down Payment Assistance Program, 2026.