Your Opinion: Meltdown of family structure affects home ownership

Dear Editor:

July 9th's reprint of an AP offering, "Black homeowners struggle as US housing market recovers" makes one wonder if it was an example of AP dredging up material and skewing it for a sob story?

The gentleman in the article, Mr. Dorn, bought a home over 20 years ago. He inherited another home. He is losing both homes to foreclosure. No mention was made of why Mr. Dorn didn't make his house payments, nor why Mr. Dorn didn't sell the house he inherited and use the proceeds to pay down the mortgage on his primary home.

Interest rates for both fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages have dropped significantly during the past 20 years. Mr. Dorn should have had the opportunity to refinance several times and reduce his monthly payment by 20-25 percent. Also, the dramatic appreciation in housing values in the San Francisco area should have substantially increased Mr. Dorn's equity during the past 20 years.

The article points to the disparity in home ownership rates by using data from a Harvard report. It is interesting to note that 2004, used as a base for the article, was the last year that blacks had a higher home ownership rate than Hispanics. In 1994, the earliest data year in the study, home ownership rates for whites, Hispanics & blacks were 70.0 percent, 41.2 percent and 42.5 percent. In 2016 the rates were 71.9 percent, 46.0 percent & 42.2 percent. During that time home ownership rates for whites increased by 2.7 percent while it increased 11.7 percent for Hispanics. For blacks it decreased by 0.7 percent.

Home ownership is influenced by the growing number of single-parent households. In 2014 the Census Bureau revealed that 15 percent of children in white families lived in a female-headed household compared to 50 percent of children in black families. The poverty rate for black female-headed households is over 50 percent, compared to 12 percent for married black Americans. The marriage rate for blacks was actually higher than for whites until the mid '60s. Since then the marriage rate for whites has declined slightly while the marriage rate for blacks has plummeted.

A lot more effort should be made to determine how to reverse the meltdown of the black family structure that has occurred since the "War on Poverty" started in the late '60s.

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