Introducing the Black Business Parity Dashboard from the Center for Community Uplift at Brookings Metro

Starting a business is often an important economic lifeline for individuals, but growing that business and eventually hiring employees is crucial to community wealth-building. As of 2022, the wealth gap between Black and white Americans was $240,120 per household. Fortunately, Black wealth is increasing, and the second-largest component of that increase is business ownership.  

For Black Americans, owning an employer business (businesses with at least one employee) is also a crucial economic justice tool for narrowing the racial wealth gap, which was formed through centuries of denying them the ability to own anything. According to 2024 data, employer business owners had a median wealth of $550,000, while the median wealth for owners of non-employer businesses was just $135,000. 

The Center for Community Uplift focuses on employer businesses because their growth creates wealth beyond the individual owner. When an entrepreneur becomes an employer, they create jobs, expand access to products and services, and circulate capital through local communities and regional economies.

In recent years, there are encouraging signs that increasing and sustaining the share of Black employer business ownership in the United States is possible. From 2017 to 2022, the number of Black-owned employer businesses nationally increased year over year, along with increases in their number of employees, annual payroll, and revenue. If this growth continues and the share of Black business owners reaches parity with the overall Black population share, the U.S. would see the creation of 757,000 new businesses, and with them, 6.3 million more jobs and an additional $824 billion in revenue circulating in local economies.  

Yet in nearly every city across the country, the share of Black-owned employer businesses falls short of the share of Black residents. This local-level disparity is reflected nationally: In 2022, Black people represented 14.4% of the American population, yet only 3.3% of all employer business owners. The lack of Black representation in owning and expanding local businesses signals a gap in the market and an opportunity for cities to invest in an under-supported population of potential business owners. 

The Center for Community Uplift’s Black Business Parity Dashboard aims to help policymakers, grassroots organizers, and other community members understand the economic impact of realizing Black residents’ entrepreneurial potential in metro areas across the country. Brookings research finds that Black Americans score above the U.S. mean on entrepreneurial traits, which are associated with business ownership success. However, this potential isn’t realized due to structural barriers in business lending, such as credit access, and limited economic support from surrounding social networks due to the intergenerational denial of wealth-building opportunities.  

This dashboard uses the latest data from the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey to show, at the metro area level, how many businesses and jobs would be created, as well as the increase in revenue and wages (shown through annual payroll), if Black business ownership was at parity with their population share. This analysis assumes an expansion in the size of the economy such that no gains in Black business revenue or size come at the expense of non-Black businesses. 

We find that there is an opportunity for every city to increase its share of Black employer businesses. For example, the Atlanta metro area was home to nearly 14,000 Black employer firms in 2022, the second-highest of any city in the country. Yet even this Black mecca was far from the goal of parity between Black business ownership and population share. If Atlanta’s employer businesses were 37% Black, like its population, it would have over 63,000 Black-owned employer firms—five times the amount it currently hosts. Up north, in the Detroit metro area, increasing the share of Black employers to be on par with the share of the Black population would mean moving from just under 2,800 of these firms to over 23,000—a seven-fold increase that could bring as many as 460,000 more jobs to the metro area. According to 2019 data, jobs at local businesses represented 60% of all jobs in Detroit, making them critical for rebuilding the city’s economy after decades of job and population losses.  

Although businesses are unlikely to quadruple overnight, the Black Business Parity Dashboard allows city leaders, residents, and advocates to see the potential of programs designed to uplift Black entrepreneurs and, over time, how close they are to achieving equitable representation in business ownership. This dashboard will be updated yearly, in tandem with the Center for Community Uplift’s annual business report, allowing users to examine their progress toward an equitable business environment. Individuals and organizations looking to grow opportunities and jobs are encouraged to use this tool to envision what is possible for their cities, and to contextualize their progress with other metro areas around the country.