Only about 53% of U.S. adults own homes, far below the commonly cited 65% homeownership rate, according to new Federal Reserve research that paints a starker picture of access to homeownership.
(PSA: Never trust the state’s statistics.)
Own=is in fucking debt forever until death over nothing because the bank will eventually repocess it.
Every single house for sale in my part of town is selling for TRIPLE the price it sold for 6 years ago. Interestingly almost all of them were sold, by different people, around 5 to 7 years prior.
Current: Homes with resident owner
New: People who own their home
Homes can’t own people, so only the new measure can reasonably be called ‘home ownership’
The first statistic only works if there’s zero difference between what kind of households live in rented houses and purchased houses.
Now let’s get numbers for USians under 50, and USians who make under the median income. 53% is still too high.
Cowards.
This is anecdotal and with a few caveats: In my area, and people I work with (which are generally good jobs) I’d say of those 40 and up it’s something like 75%. Of the other 25% that are living in apts or rental houses, I’d say 10% is due to choice. So maybe 15% want to own an home but can’t. One other thing to note is in this area, Raleigh area and suburbs, home prices are reasonable, especially when you get out a little. Now the home I just purchased almost 4 years ago has almost doubled in price in the last 10-15 years or so. So if I had purchased the same house I’m in, in 2010 or so, I would have spent almost half as much money. No my salary hasn’t doubled in 16 years so there’s that.
Under 40, the story is way different. Probably more like 25% own homes. Shit is just way too expensive. And again my experience is with people making decent salaries in IT and academia. There is no way in hell someone 25 work two retail jobs could even touch the down payment, let alone the mortgage without 6 other roommates. Case in point, my son’s rent on a 1 bedroom apt is 2x what my first mortgage was on a 4 bedroom in 2001.
It’s worth reading the underlying paper, here.
Figure 3 has an interactive chart showing both stats (the traditional measure and the new metric under discussion), and visually shows the spread, by age, across all age groups. (If you’re on a phone you can pull the chart up full screen to be able to see y axis lines.)
Some of the discussion around there is interesting, too:
The owner-occupancy rate for households headed by adults under age 35 was 37 percent in 2024. Using the HPOP, which accounts for co-residents and dorm dwellers, we find a substantially lower number: only 22 percent of adults under 35 own their homes.
Figure 6 gives state by state data and shows the actual spread between the two metrics for each state, so you can see big state differences, too.
Yeah and the people who do “own” homes own like 30% of it and the bank owns the rest on average I’d bet. I feel like home ownership should be defined as actually owning the home, not having a contract with a bank where if you miss a couple payments they’ll be taking it back thank you very much. Do you really “own” something if it can be legally taken from you for non-payment? No, that’s what we call leasing-to-own, not owning, but nobody seems to want to think of housing that way, because then like 5% of people would truly “own” their homes lol.
Because Blackstone owns them all, now.
The traditional homeownership rate, tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau, measures the share of occupied homes in which the owner lives. The new measure from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, called the homeowners-to-population ratio, or HPOP, instead calculates the share of adults who own a home.
For any Canadians reading, this almost certainly applies to us as well as we determine the home ownership rate in the same flawed way. It misses all sorts of living situations such as adult children living with parents, people renting a room, people renting non-legal suites in a house where the other half is occupied by the owner, etc.
53% is a lie as well. It’s closer to 30%.
The ratio of home ownership probably looks closer to the distribution of the demographics of congress than that of America.
Who owns the rest of the houses?
Corporations
And who owns corporations?
The ultra-rich. They are buying everything up because that’s what you do when you have millions or billions of surplus money that grows with compound interest. You “invest” it by buying assets. Stock in corporations, real estate, assets. They are financial black holes sucking everything in because we don’t have any societal mechanism to stop the exponential growth.
Tax wealth, not work.
Yeah, now factor in what percentage of those homes are actually owned by the bank.
Yeah 53% is likely incorrect as well. Census “data” is objectively bad for meaningful information.
The commonly reported statistic asks, what percentage of adults live in homes owned by a resident, rather than rent? That’s been steady in the mid-60 percentages for decades.
This new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis offers another statistic for consideration: the ratio of homeowners to the adult population.
The main categories of people who differ in this proposed methodology:
- People who live in group home settings that do not ordinarily count as renters, like dorms, nursing homes, and prisons, are now included in the denominator (and not considered homeowners). Previously, these didn’t count towards the ratio in either the numerator or denominator.
- Adult family members of homeowners who do not pay rent (adult children, parents of an owner, etc.), or adult roommates paying for a room. This turns out to be about 13.9% of the population.
Most importantly, these are unevenly distributed by geographical region, age, other demographics. Not all of these are bad (nothing wrong with multi-generation living arrangements), but they can show trends across time or place, and pick up less noticeable trends in people’s living situations more broadly.
Why do they have to research this? Just ask people.
