Tag Archives: Pew Foundation

Another population bubble

affordable housing, Baby Boomers, Burlington, density, home ownership, housing, housing crisis, Millennial generation, renters, , , , , ,

Millennials become the most numerous living generation this year, outnumbering the Baby Boomers, and there’s no shortage of treatises analyzing their tastes, their world views, and their impact on the housing market. How seriously to take these generalizations, or any other thumbnail pronouncements about generations, is an open question. (For a Pew Foundation exegesis of “generations research” that finds Millennials less religious, more diverse and less conservative than their predecessors — that is, compared to Generation X, Baby Boomers and the Silents(!), click here.)

Clearly, though, people born after 1980 tend to have higher levels of student loan debt than their forebears, and fewer are buying houses as a result.Millennials1 Young renters’ student debt burdens grew after the Great Recession, even as their median incomes dropped, which left them less able to qualify for a mortgage or to save for a downpayment. A new research brief from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, “Student Loan Debt and the Housing Decisions of Young Households,” lays out the details.

Nevertheless, there are commentators who see Millennials as poised to fuel a housing boom. “Millennials are making their move in the housing market,” proclaims the Dallas Morning News, quoting real-estate industry source attributing 30 percent of home sales to Millennials.

The common notion that Millennials want to live in cities is subject to dispute. More Millennials are moving from cities to suburbs than the other way around, Census data supposedly show. A survey came out earlier this year that got plenty of attention: It had 66 percent of Millennials preferring a life in suburbs, 24 percent rural areas, and just 10 percent cities.

The survey was sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders, though — an entity that would seem to have a vested interest in promoting the single-family-home-big-yard lifestyle.

But wait. A survey closer to home suggests that many Millennials really do hanker for a single-family home with a big yard. The 2014 “Young Professional Housing Survey Report,” sponsored by the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, asked 400 respondents (63 percent of whom were renters) what type of residence they would most like to live in, and 82 percent said single-family detached house with a yard. And most of those wanted a big yard!millennials2

Now, to the extent that these Burlington-area Millennials prefer suburban living, they do want to live in a place that’s a short commute to work, and a place where they can walk to community services.

Still, the young cohort seems to cling to the old American dream of a low-density-neighborhood lifestyle. Hasn’t anyone told them that big yards are obsolete in the Age of Climate Change?

Racial disparity: here we go again

civil rights, fair housing, home ownership, segregation, , , , , , , ,

debt

ProPublica has a fine expose on racial disparities in debt-collection litigation. Reporters examined court judgments in St. Louis, Chicago and Newark and found that court judgments were twice the size in predominantly black neighborhoods compared to predominantly white neighborhoods – even controlling for income. African Americans significantly more likely than whites to be sued by debt collectors.

So what, you might ask, does this have to with housing, or more particularly, housing discrimination (AKA fair housing)?

Two things:

  • One inference from the findings is that blacks tend to have less resources – less wealth – to fall back on in hard times. Specifically, they have less wealth in the form of home equity to pass on one from one generation to the next, and that’s a legacy of housing racial discrimination that was promoted and enforced by governments at all levels – and notably, by the federal government from the 1930s on.

As the ProPublic article puts it:

“Experts cite many reasons why blacks might face more lawsuits, foremost among them the immense gap in wealth between blacks and whites in the U.S. It’s a gap that extends back to the institution of slavery and, more recently, to 20th century policies that promoted white homeownership while restricting it for blacks.”

That gap has even widened since the Great Recession, according to the Pew Foundation. The typical black household has a net worth more than 10 times less that of the typical white household:

wealthgap

 

 

 

 

 

  • The other connection to fair housing is that the racial disparity in debt-litigation cases runs parallel to the racial disparity in predatory lending that was revealed during the housing bubble years of the early 2000s. In many areas, blacks were steered to expensive home loans even when they could have qualified for standard mortgage loans. The debt collectors insist they’re treating everyone the same and not screening cases by race. That may be true, but the mass effect is similar to that produced when minorities were are targeted by predatory lenders in the years leading up to the Great Recession.

For a brief description of how a bank was called to account under the Fair Housing Act, check out this synopsis of a case that the civil rights law form Relman, Dane & Colfax filed against Wells Fargo in Baltimore, or this summary in the Baltimore Sun.