According to a new report by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, the housing crisis has eliminated large gains in home ownership among blacks and Latinos.
For blacks, the current level of homeownership actually sits lower than 1990 levels. “Between 2004–2006 and 2010, however, homeownership rates dropped sharply, and more so for Hispanic and black households than for white non-Hispanics,” the study reads. “The overall homeownership rate of 65.1 percent in April 2010 was 1.1 percentage points lower than 10 years earlier. Blacks ended the 2010s with a lower homeownership rate, 44.3 percent, than their 1990 rate of 45.2 percent and two percentage points lower than just 10 years earlier.”
The study also said that the homeownership rate among blacks now trails that of whites by nearly 28 percent, higher than the gap in 1990.
That decline in homeownership has been disastrous for the wealth blacks and Latinos. Between 2005 and 2009, Latinos lost two-thirds of their median household wealth, while blacks lost more than half, according to a study by the Pew Center.
Other researchers have found that during the housing boom, blacks and Latinos were at least twice as likely to receive high-interest loans even after adjusting for the borrower’s incomes and the loan amount.