The Anatomy of the Low-Income Homeownership Boom in the 1990s

Despite an unprecedented boom in homeownership that added seven million net new owners between 1994 and 1999 and drove the homeownership rate nearly three percentage points higher to 66.8 percent, relatively little is known about where people have been buying homes and the types of homes they have been buying. This paper fills in some of gaps in our knowledge of what and where low-income and minority homebuyers have been buying using the American Housing Survey and data reported pursuant to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Manufactured housing is shown to play a particularly important role in satisfying low-income buyers’ housing demand. More than one-quarter of such buyers purchased manufactured homes nationwide in 1997, and in the South in 1997 fully 40 percent bought them. In the Northeast and in central cities, apartment condos also have played an important role in meeting low-income ownership demand—as much as one-quarter—but for only about 10 percent of that demand nationwide…