Harvard Study Black homeowners struggle despite recovering market

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO

Yul Dorn and his wife raised their son and daughter in a three-bedroom home crammed with family photos, one they bought in a historically African-American neighborhood in San Francisco more than two decades ago.

Today, they 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 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, Asian-Americans and Latinos slowly see gains in home-buying. 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 African-American homeowner rate had fallen to 42.2 percent and lagged 29.7 percentage points behind whites, nearly a percentage point higher than in 2015.