Homeownership Rates: It depends on whether you are married

Published by the R Street Institute.

The attached piece originally appeared in the Autumn 2016 edition of Housing Finance International.

American political rhetoric endlessly repeats that homeownership is part of the “American Dream.” So it is for most people, especially if you are married, as we will see.

As part of promoting this “dream,” the U.S. government has for many years created large subsidies for mortgage borrowing and huge government-sponsored financial institutions to expand mortgage lending. Most notable among these are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which notoriously went broke in 2008 while following the government’s orders to make more so-called “affordable” loans, and survived only thanks to a $189 billion taxpayer bailout.

Fannie and Freddie are still massive operations, featuring a combined $5 trillion in assets (that’s trillion with a “T”), equity capital that is basically zero and utter dependence on the credit of the U.S. Treasury.

Given these massive and extremely expensive efforts, how has the American homeownership rate fared? Let us look back 30 years to 1985, and compare it to 2015. Thus we can go past the housing bubble and collapse of the 2000s, as well as past the financial collapse of the savings and loans in the late 1980s, and observe what has happened over a generation.

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