The Growing Racial Gap in Home Ownership

houseThere continues to be a large racial gap in home ownership rates in the United States. According to recently released data from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2014, 72.6 percent of non-Hispanic White Americans owned their home. For African Americans, only 43.0 percent owned their home. Thus, there is a huge 30 percentage point gap in home ownership rates.

Furthermore, the gap in home ownership rates has been expanding in recent years. Black home ownership peaked in 2004 at 49.1 percent. But since that time, undoubtedly due to the 2008 recession and slow economic recovery, African American home ownership rates have steadily declined. Home ownership rates for non-Hispanic Whites have also declined slightly but the racial gap has expanded.

Why are these statistics relevant to higher education? The simple fact is that many American families use the equity in their home to finance the higher education of their children or grandchildren. Since this source of wealth is less available to Black families, this places African Americans at a disadvantage in financing higher education.

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1 COMMENT

  1. Until you began to examine the origins of the home ownership “gap” (e.g., being denied) via the racist Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) government-sponsored corporation during the New Deal Era, you’re not being intellectually honest. In other words, the Black community has never fully recovered during this time period. When you have financial institutions such as Bank of America, BBT, Wachovia, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup,Wells Fargo, The Bank of New York, U.S. Bancorp, HSBC, PNC, Capital One, State Street Corporation, or TD Bank, etc. denying Blacks home mortgages, charging exorbitant interest rates what do you expect.

    As a result of their scrupulous financial practices against the Black community resulted in many of them paying hefty fines thanks to the work of the SEC( Security Exchange Commission) along with the DOJ (Department of Justice). Thereby, when you merge or correlate the aforementioned with this article, then, your article has more validity.

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