Black Homeownership Drops to All-Time Low | Hacker News Reader

Black Homeownership Drops to All-Time Low

wsj.com

20 pointsspking7 comments

I've seen a lot of Hispanic home ownership in the bay area (one of the most expensive places to buy a home), from what I've seen, the people who work more blue collar type jobs pool their money together with extended family and buy a house, pretty smart.

---- Rate of Home Ownership Q1 2019 -----

All races: 64.2%

White (non-hispanic): 73.2% (+-0.4%)

Hispanic: 47.4% (+-0.9%)

Black: 41.1% (+-0.9%)

Other races: 53.9% (+-1.1%)

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

This Excel document contains historic data going back through Q1 1994 up to Q1 2019 (although it lacks the MoE per above):

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab16.xlsx

The article seems to be factually accurate. Although it would have been useful to convert the rate into absolute terms, but I cannot find that information on the Census's pages by race.

Marriage rates seem to have been ignored. That's a factor directly correlated to home ownership.

Ditto for Rural/Suburban/Urban distribution. Closer you get to the city, the more expensive the houses, and the lower the rate of home ownership.

In all fairness, while these to factors likely explain a portion of the difference in ownership, neither explains the recent drop for Blacks.

I looked for articles approaching this like a question seeking an answer, but all I found were articles declaring, with dogmatic certitude, that the sole cause was racism and historical redlining. That’s a possible explanation, of course, but I’m still waiting to see some data and preferably a little bit of that rare objectivity.

certainly it musn't be an all-time low, considering that near 0 african americans owned homes prior to 1863 and near 0 african peoples were in america in the 1600s

Heck, humanity as a whole didn't exist only a few million years ago. And the concept of ownership probably only a bit before that. Jeez, journalism these days, thinking they can ignore billions of years of cosmic history for the sake of an article about modern issues.

To be fair ‘all time’ is an odd choice of words, given that its literal meaning is not the intended meaning, and the intended meaning is unknown. Does the timeframe go back to 1900? Or 1980? Does it go back to friggin Jamestown? The timeframe matters, because the further back it goes, the worse this news is for the Black community.

The editor whiffed with this title...and then proceeded to not mention the timeframe in the article, either.

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