The gulf between Black homeowners and White is actually getting bigger, not smaller

Washington, DC
CNN
 — 

While more Americans own homes today than a decade ago and the rate is increasing across all races, the gap between Black homeownership rates and that of any other race or ethnic group is even larger now than in 2011, according to a new analysis by the National Association of Realtors.

Across a slew of metrics, the challenges Black home buyers are up against are sizeable and showing little improvement.

The homeownership rate for White Americans in 2021 was 72.7%, but the rate for Black Americans was 44%, according to NAR’s analysis of the most recent data. The homeownership rate for Asian Americans was 62.8% and for Hispanic Americans it was 50.6%.

All groups tracked in the research saw homeownership rates grow over the last decade, but the Black homeownership rate continues to lag far behind, ticking up only 0.4 percentage points in a decade while the rate for Hispanic Americans rose by 4 percentage points.

Homeownership in the United States reached its lowest level in 2015 and has steadily risen since to a rate of 65.5% of Americans owning homes in 2021. More Americans own homes than a decade ago, with about 9.2 million more homeowners today than in 2011.

But Black Americans have seen the smallest share of that growth. This results in what housing advocates and economists call a “racial homeownership gap” between the share of Black families that own homes and the share of White families that own homes. That gap is now 29%, compared to 26% in 2011.

Not all buyers have the same shot at homeownership or its wealth-generating prospects in the United States. The reasons include historical prejudice and redlining practices that continue today. Just this week, the Department of Justice secured a $9 million settlement to resolve allegations that Park National Bank in Ohio engaged in a pattern of mortgage lending discrimination by ‘redlining’ in Columbus, Ohio. Redlining is an illegal practice in which lenders avoid providing credit services to people in specific communities because of the race or national origin of the residents there.

But there are other causes, according to the NAR analysis, including the high cost of homeownership, the outsized cost burden on Black home buyers and additional discrimination in lending.

Housing affordability…