With divergent homeownership levels blamed for yawning racial wealth gaps both nationally and locally, a group of housing and civil rights leaders have released a proposal to create 3 million net new Black homeowners by 2030.

The seven-point “3by30” plan was released Friday by the Black Homeownership Collaborative, led by executives from the Mortgage Bankers Association, NAACP, National Association of Realtors, National Association of Real Estate Brokers, National Fair Housing Alliance, National Housing Conference, National Urban League and Urban Institute.

“With homeownership a major driver of intergenerational household wealth and financial stability, the nation cannot achieve true racial and economic justice without addressing the barriers to Black homeownership,” said Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League.

Black homeownership rate in the U.S. currently stands at 42.3 percent. The national homeownership rate is 64.1 percent, while the rate for whites stands at 72.2 percent. Left unaddressed, the Black homeownership rate will fall even further by 2040, the Urban Institute projects.

And an often-cited 2015 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston report calculated that the median net worth of a white household was $247,500 in 2014, and $8 for a Black household, in large part thanks to disparities in homeownership.

According to a February NAR report, only 36 percent of Black Bay Staters own their own home, putting Massachusetts 28th among all states, plus Puerto Rico and Washington D.C., for homeownership.

Sixty-seven percent of White Massachusetts residents own their own home, NAR reported, while 56 percent of Asian Americans and less than 1 in 3 Latinos own their own home. The report also estimated that the region’s high home prices leave most Blacks and Latinos unable to afford to buy houses.

“The persistent gap in homeownership rates among Black and white Americans illustrates how racial inequality in our society translates into wealth inequality,” NAR Vice President of Policy Bryan Greene said in a statement accompanying the 3by30 plan’s announcement.

The plan released Friday calls for boosting funding and effort by government and industry forces around seven focus areas:

• Homeownership counseling, particularly for first-time and first-generation homebuyers and those who have been denied mortgage approvals. The plan also calls for post-purchase counseling to support these buyers and make sure they are able to keep their homes and reduce lenders’ servicing and delinquency costs.
• Down payment assistance, focused on closing the gap between the support families of most Black first-generation homebuyers can offer and the substantially higher down payments required by today’s high home prices.
• Housing production, aimed at growing the supply of entry-level and other lower-priced homes via land use reforms and public investment in affordable housing construction.
• Credit and lending innovations that do a better job identifying who can afford a home and which can help loan originators identify potential future clients who, with counseling help, can qualify down the road. Special purpose credit programs and other mortgage products are needed that can be targeted at communities that were specifically excluded from mortgage borrowing in decades past.
• Better enforcement of fair housing laws by the federal government to weed out those who still discriminate and practices that create systemic barriers to homebuying.
• Early interventions to keep Black homeowners vulnerable to foreclosure from falling down that path, as well as continued assistance to make up for COVID-19’s outsized impact on homeowners of color.
• Marketing and outreach by lenders to spark interest in Black communities that have written off the possibility of homeownership thanks to experiencing decades of systemic discrimination, and develop tailored strategies to help make the other elements of the 3by30 plan a reality.