National Study Shows Large Gap
Despite low mortgage rates, new loan types and policy efforts to increase minority homeownership, researchers said this week that the gap in homeownership rates between whites and blacks and Hispanics persists.
A national study released Wednesday by the University of Southern California's Lusk Center for Real Estatecolor> analyzed data over an 18-year period ending in 2001. During that time, the average difference in homeownership between whites and blacks was 26 percentage points. The average difference for whites and Hispanics was 28 points. The gap persists: As of the second quarter of 2004, 76 percent of non-Hispanic whites owned their homes, while 50 percent of blacks and 47 percent of Hispanics were homeowners.
Difficulty getting credit accounted for not more than 5 percentage points of the differences, researchers found.
``This suggests that policy makers will need to look beyond innovations in mortgage finance if their goal is to further expand homeownership,'' the study's authors wrote.
The rise in homeownership rates in the United States in the 1990s was caused largely by increases in household incomes, researchers said, and ``innovations in mortgage finance and declining interest rates, while clearly beneficial to homeowners, likely were not the primary drivers.''