NEW JERSEY — New Jersey is one of the richest states in the nation, but the money isn’t trickling down equally. This is the conclusion of a recent study, which found that there is a massive “racial wealth gap” that has only gotten worse in the past few years.

On Thursday, the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ) released a report that claims there are serious disparities in wealth among white, Black and Latino/Latina families in the Garden State.

“Due to small sample size and wide margins of error, we do not have sufficient evidence to publish with confidence the estimates of wealth for Asian people in New Jersey,” a spokesperson told Patch.

Read the full study and see its methodology here.

According to the Newark-based nonprofit, the median household wealth of white families in New Jersey is $662,500, compared to less than $20,000 for Black and Latina/o families.

The numbers are just as bad when examined on a per-person basis, the group says. For individuals, the median net worth of white New Jersey residents is $192,700 – compared with $14,000 and $5,000 for Black and Latino/Latina residents.

Advocates said that the wealth gap has only gotten worse since a similar analysis was done in 2022, which examined data gathered before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since that time, New Jersey’s $300,000 racial wealth gap between Black/Latina and white families has more than doubled to nearly $640,000, the NJISJ reported.

The report also found that there are other serious financial disparities in New Jersey:

HOMEOWNERSHIP GAP – “The statewide homeownership rate for white New Jersey households is 76.6%, nearly double the homeownership rates for Black and Latino/a New Jersey households who have homeownership rates of 41.3% and 40.4% percent, respectively. These disparities in homeownership have changed very little over the past decade.”

INCOME GAP – “The median household income in New Jersey is $110,100 for white households, but just $76,100 for Latina/o households and $68,900 for Black households.”

POVERTY GAP – “About one-sixth of Black and Latina/o families live below the federal poverty line, together making up over half of all people in poverty in the state – even though they represent about a third of the state’s population. And economic vulnerability is much more widespread than the federal poverty line reveals due to the inadequacy of the poverty line in measuring the true costs of necessities, particularly in New Jersey.”

“We did not come by these Two New Jerseys – a prosperous place for many white households and an economically uncertain one for the majority of our Black and Brown households – by accident,” said Laura Sullivan, director of the NJISJ’s Economic Justice Program.

“Where we are today is the result of choice – patterns created by design through public policies and social exclusions,” Sullivan said.

“We must, at this critical moment, choose better,” Sullivan added.

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