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Abstract
The housing crisis and ensuing Great Recession of the late 2000s resulted in millions of homeowners losing their homes to foreclosure and millions more losing substantial amounts of housing wealth as home prices plummeted. These substantial financial losses have raised important questions about the appropriateness of policies to encourage homeownership as a wealth building strategy for low-income and minority households. In 2013 the Joint Center for Housing Studies published a paper entitled “Is Homeownership Still
an Effective Means of Building Wealth for Low-income and Minority Households? (Was it Ever?)” as part of our 2013 symposium held to reexamine the goals of homeownership and explore lessons learned from the housing crisis.
That study found that despite the severity of the housing crash, the median household who bought a home after 1999 still managed to accrue significant amounts of wealth through 2009, the latest year for which data was available at the time. While about a quarter of new homeowners over this period were no longer owners as of 2009, among those who had exited homeownership, the typical household
ended the period with wealth that was little changed from before they bought their homes.
