Black homeowners struggle as US housing market recovers
SAN FRANCISCO » Yul Dorn and his wife raised their son and daughter in a threebedroom home crammed with family photos, one they bought in a historically African-American neighborhood in San Francisco more than two decades ago.
Today, the couple is living in a motel after they were evicted last year, having lost a foreclosure battle. A second home they inherited is also in default.
The Dorns expect to join the growing ranks of African-Americans who do not own their homes, a rate that was nearly 30 percentage points higher than that of whites in 2016, according to a new report.
“The person who bought the house, we lost all of our memories,” said Dorn, a pastor and case manager with the city health department.
“He put the furniture out on the street, and it was just devastating to my family.”
The nation’s homeownership rate appears to be stabilizing as people rebound from the 2007 recession that left millions unemployed and home values underwater, according
to the report by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. But it found African-Americans aren’t sharing in the recovery, even as whites, AsianAmericans and Latinos slowly see gains in homebuying. The center said the disparity between whites and blacks is at its highest
in 70-plus years of data.
Experts say reasons for the lower homeownership rate range from historic underemployment and low wages to a recession-related foreclosure crisis that hit black communities particularly hard. In 2004, the pinnacle of U.S. homeownership,
three-quarters of whites and nearly half of blacks owned homes, according to the Harvard study.
By 2016, the AfricanAmerican homeowner rate had fallen to 42.2 percent and lagged 29.7 percentage points behind whites, nearly a percentage point higher than in 2015.
Now, a lack of affordable housing and stricter lending are making it harder for first-time buyers to obtain what traditionally has been considered an essential part of the American dream and a way to build wealth.
“It has always been historically and systemically harder for blacks, and we were seeing there a little bit of progress, and now we’re back at square one,” said Alanna McCargo, co-director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a think-tank focused on inner-city issues that published a similar report .
An AP analysis of U.S. Census Bureau statistics shows some pockets of the Midwest and California had the lowest homeownership rates for African-Americans, while some areas of the South had the highest.