Black homeowners still struggle as U.S. housing market recovers
African-Americans haven’t made same gains as whites since 2007 foreclosure crisis
SAN FRANCISCO— Yul Dorn and his wife raised their daughter and son in a three-bedroom home crammed with family photos, one they bought in a historically African-American neighbourhood 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 white people 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 home-ownership rate in the U.S. appears to be stabilizing as Americans 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 Black Americans aren’t sharing in the recovery, even as white people, Asian-Americans and Latinos slowly see gains in home-buying. The centre said the disparity between white people and Black people is at its highest in 70-plus years of data.
Experts say reasons for the lower home-ownership 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. home ownership, three-quarters of white people and nearly half of Black people owned homes, according to the Harvard study.
By 2016, the African-American homeowner rate had fallen to 42.2 per cent and lagged 29.7 percentage points behind white people, 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, which published a similar report.
An Associated Press 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.