Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy. Read more at Stateline.org.
Some cities and states are trying to boost Black homeownership, which dropped to a 60-year low even before the economic turmoil wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Black homeownership fell in 2019 to 40.6%, down from the 2004 peak of 49.7%. The rate has rebounded somewhat since then, but advocates remain dismayed at how, decades after the 1968 Fair Housing Act, Black families still struggle to become homeowners at the same rate as white peers.
“To see the Black homeownership rate lower than the generation before is shocking, considering what earlier generations faced,” said Janneke Ratcliffe, vice president of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.
The persistence of redlining, the Great Recession, gentrification and the increasing number of homes being scooped up by investors all have contributed to a growing Black-white disparity in homeownership, which is larger now than it was in the early 1960s, before the 1968 Fair Housing Act and other civil rights legislation.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Stateline over at Maryland Matters
