Homeownership Declining in Majority of Biggest U.S. Cities

Since 2000, homeownership has declined in a vast majority of America’s biggest cities, said Trulia, San Francisco.

The report, Where Have All the Homeowners Gone? (https://www.trulia.com/blog/trends/neighborhood-homeownership/), said from 2000 to 2016 homeownership rates fell in 90 of the 100 largest metro areas. Trulia Economist and report author Felipe Chacón said some cities, such as Cape Coral, Fla., Las Vegas and Phoenix have seen “dramatic shifts” to renting from home ownership, while many Northeast metros have bucked the national trend and seen an increase in homeownership.

The report also found huge shifts neighborhood to neighborhood within individual cities. Even within markets such as Houston and New York, where the home ownership rates are close to what they were in 2000, some ZIP codes have seen drops in ownership rates by as much as 33 percentage points while others have seen ownership rise by up to 18 percentage points.

Key findings:

–Of the 10 metros that have seen a rise in homeownership, all but Honolulu are in the Northeast.

–Nationally, 4% of larger ZIP codes (with at least 1,000 occupied housing units) have had a decrease in their homeownership rate from 2000 to 2016.

–The Georgia Tech neighborhood in Atlanta (ZIP code 30313) where median household income has more than tripled, has seen the largest swing to home ownership going to 32.5% in 2016 up from 13.1% owner in 2000.

–The Western Glendale area in Phoenix (85305) has seen the single largest drop in ownership rate, going to 50.5% from 92.6% following the construction of almost 2,000 apartment units over the past 16 years in the area.

Chacón said neighborhoods that swung to renters from owners or vice versa were influenced by three factors: changes in household income, the type of new construction–or lack of it–in the area and the housing crisis which ultimately displaced huge swaths of the population.

“While it’s impossible to predict what will happen next, as incomes rise or fall, new rentals, or homes are built and instability–these factors always will have an outsized influence in whether a neighborhood is full of homeowners or renters,” Chacón said.