MarketWatch, June 27, 2019: Black millennials less likely to own a home than their grandparents were at same age
The Great Recession delivered a far bigger hit to black Americans’ already meager wealth holdings— depressed by slavery, centuries of discrimination and deliberately discriminatory housing policies — than it did to whites. That has left the home ownership gap between blacks and whites at its worst level since the New Deal, according to a new report from the Stanford Center for Poverty and Inequality.
The authors, Darrick Hamilton and Christopher Famighetti, compared household heads aged 20–29 across generations. Their startling finding: “The only generation with a lower homeownership rate than millennials is the Greatest Generation. This generation was coming out of the Great Depression in 1940 and didn’t benefit much from the New Deal programs that assisted with homeownership.”
Along with the overwhelming effects on black neighborhoods in the form of tumbling prices and rising foreclosures, other factors may be at play.
“It is likely that urban gentrification and more stringent mortgage eligibility criteria, along with ongoing lending and housing discrimination, are impeding home purchases among millennials,” the report says.
