The 2008 housing crisis hit everybody hard, but black communities were ravished, not only by the loss of homes, but the loss of jobs and income. As the Washington Post reports, while some of those things have been ameliorated after President Obama came into office, housing is not one of them.
But the holy grail of homeownership remains elusive. Forty-three percent of blacks owned homes in 2017, according to an annual reportfrom the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. In contrast, 72 percent of whites did, a gap that has mostly widened during the past three decades.
One of the issues is that many people are finding it harder and harder to not only find affordable homes, but homes covered by Federal Housing Administration mortgages, allowing for lower down payments. If you don’t have a ton saved but have a decent job, you cannot afford anything. The other issue is that because of rapidly widening income inequality, there are people willing to overbid and wave all kinds of contingencies—a wildly risky option for someone without the means, and more importantly, for someone actually interested in living in that home as opposed to simply “flipping it” as an investment. But, there is a huge racial component here, as black home ownership has not seen any of the gains that white or Asian or Latino ownership has seen since the housing crisis.
After finding steady jobs and rebuilding their credit after the recession, some African Americans are having a hard time saving for a down payment. Black workers are more likely than other racial groups to see their paychecks, which are already smaller than those of the average white worker, eaten up by student loan payments and growing rental bills, housing experts say. And when they do feel ready to buy a home, people of color often face higher fees that make the loans unaffordable.
Black Americans were foreclosed on at almost twice the rate as white people during the housing crisis, and that’s a big hole to get out of—which is another reason for the dire home-owning situation. And under George W. Bush, the black community was preyed upon more than any other group when it came to predatory home loans.
Overall, blacks were 150 percent more likely to get high-cost loans, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. Even when they had similar income and credit scores as white borrowers, blacks were about 30 percent more likely to be steered to expensive mortgages.
And shortly after the housing crisis, getting a loan became an incredibly hard bit of business, especially for anyone who had lost so much credit, or had a decent amount of credit. The past couple of years has seen a loosening of loan requirements, but it’s also seen a housing market that is bananas crazy expensive. What you could buy just six years ago for $400,000 is worth well over $1,000,000 in many places.
With Trump and Ben Carson running HUD, the chances of things getting better for anyone in need are next to zero, and for African Americans, that number goes into negative. There was a reason that, out of all the jobs handed out to Trump’s scumbag “supporters,” Ben Carson was given the job of heading Housing and Urban Development (HUD). With a full-blown white supremacist in office, giving the appearance that Trump had a singular “black friend” gave white people and white pundits a talking point to delude themselves into believing that Trump wasn’t racist—and by extension, that they themselves weren’t racist. Making Carson the face of HUD was also an easy way of creating at least a small defense against the inevitable reality that this administration was not and is not interested in helping people of color make the first important step in accumulating wealth—buying a house.
So while Ben Carson worries about making taxpayers foot the bill for expensive dining room sets, the majority of Americans worry about what the future holds for the safety and wellbeing of their families.