Editor's note.

They started small. Land had always meant something to my mother's parents, poor farmers-turned-schoolteachers. So after my grandpa sold his share in the small-town Kansas hardware store he and a friend had opened after returning from World War II, they saved their pennies.

The frugality they had learned during the Great Depression paid off. They owned their Colorado Springs, Colo., home free and clear, and started to buy others. There was the modest mountain cabin I visited as a little girl, where hail rattled the metal roof during summer storms. Slowly, they took on about eight other homes and duplexes, carrying many mortgages themselves.

They had no retirement accounts. But thanks to their investing, and the stock my grandpa had bought from the paint company he later worked for, when they died they left somewhere around $500,000 for their children and grandchildren.

As this month's cover story shows, buying a home builds wealth across generations. It's an apt topic to kick off this year's Chicago Matters: Money Talks series, through our annual partnership with Chicago Public Radio, WTIW Channel 11 and the Chicago Public Library, sponsored by The Chicago Community Trust.

When it comes to homebuying as an investment strategy, however, not all Chicagoans are cashing in. In a review of mortgage lending data, Reporter Kimbriell Kelly found that many disparities remain: African Americans in our city, for instance, are less likely to get approved for mortgages than they were more than a decade ago. And buyers of any race are less likely to get approved in mostly black neighborhoods.

My family's story backs that up. While my mother's white parents could leave a nice nest egg behind, my father's black parents could not.

His parents were not allowed to live wherever they liked, much less buy homes in other areas. Some of their relatives were sidled brick masons who built homes for their families. But decades of segregation kept those properties from appreciating much. And my dad's father never had a prayer of owning a share of the dress shop where he worked--he was confined to the stock room and sent to make deliveries.

Economically, it all left my father's side of the family a couple of generations behind my mother's-not because they failed to save their money or seize opportunities, but because they were never afforded those opportunities in the first place.

It explains why someone like Valerie Jones, a 68-year-old African American, would share her story with Kelly, explaining that downsizing to a condo will allow her and her husband to give their sons $30,000.

My dad will also be able to leave something to his children and grandchildren, thanks to savvy financial planning by him and his wife. But I also know a lot of it will come from the 60 or so years he has spent working nearly nonstop.

I am grateful he didn't give up on his dream to lift himself, and his children, out of the poverty he knew as a boy. I just wish he had been given the option to do it some other way.