San Francisco Chronicle, February 7, 2022, 1,200 potential buyers: The Bay Area’s daunting real estate math after COVID
Long term, economists warn that the severe lack of housing options could widen the gap between the wealthiest households and middle-class residents looking to put down roots, and prompt more aspiring home buyers to leave the area altogether.
Concerns about widening inequality are magnified when breaking down the data by race. Black home buyers have less than half of the buying power of white counterparts in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metro area, Evangelou said, due to stark racial income gaps in the region.
As new housing and tax proposals fuel debate at public meetings around the Bay Area, stark disparities in who is best positioned to reap the benefits of skyrocketing home values have also been front and center in other recent reports. Last month, federal financial regulators were presented with major proposed reforms to the home appraisal system after lawsuits over racial bias in places including the North Bay. And an analysis of federal home lending data found that most non-white applicants still face longer loan approval odds and higher closing costs.
“Black and Hispanic borrowers bought less valuable homes than white and some Asian borrowers,” the lending report by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found, “and they paid more to do so.”
