Home sweet...?

There are two homeowners in my family, and as much as I wish it were the case, I ain't one of 'em (Boston home prices be damned).

Still, for us, and probably for thousands of black families, that's progress over a generation ago, when my mother and seven of her eight siblings bounced between rented properties and the projects, where I was raised until I was about 10. By the time I was 13, my moms could finally afford a crib of her own. When I was in college, my aunt and her husband left brick city and moved on up to a nice spot in suburban Pittsburgh, nothing fabulous but nice enough for they and their kids and family gatherings that my mother can't be bothered with hosting.

Given that in my own lifetime my family went from subsidized housing to homeownership, that over the last decade you had to have been under a very large rock to not be lambasted with the advice that homeownership is the best way for families in this country to get their piece of the rock (this is even more critical for black families, which I'll discuss later) and that I got a pretty quick jump-off to my own career, it was only natural that I thought I'd be a homeowner by now. That the housing bubble (I'm coming back to that at some point, too) and those damn Boston home prices have stalled that goal is a big disappointment.

But not nearly as disappointing -- no, staggered -- as I was over the past two days listening to three of my white colleagues talk about buying new homes and selling old ones. That each of them already owned homes was no surprise; the telling thing was that they're all in the process of buying second homes, vacation homes or trading up from one place to a larger, ostensibly more valuable house, that they talked about it with the casualness of a barmaid taking a drink order.

Let me be clear: I'm not hating on my brothers from another color. But it was on some level galling to hear people talk about buying and selling homes (in Boston no less, where the median-priced crib costs a cool half-mil), like they were talking about the latest CD they downloaded.

It brought a lot home for me, thinking about my family members who accomplished so much by buying one house but perhaps so little in because their homes are the only they'll ever own. It makes me wonder if all the talk in the last few years about homeownership being the key to wealth wasn't more than a little overblown, whether no matter how much property my generation of African-Americans acquires, the wealth gap is just too wide to close.

Am I onto something, or just thinking too hard?