U.S. Homes Bought at Fastest Clip in 15 Years

Americans purchased homes this year at the fastest rate in 15 years, the Clinton Administration said Tuesday, attributing the increase to its new strategy for helping more families buy homes.

Since January, 721,000 people have purchased homes, raising the homeownership rate to 64.7% of American households at the end of June--the largest single-quarter increase since 1980, Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros said. At the end of 1994, the homeownership rate was 64.2% and remained at that level through March.

Officials conceded that a general improvement in the economy, low mortgage interest rates and low inflation contributed to the increase in home ownership.

But Cisneros also credited President Clinton’s National Homeownership Strategy, a program begun last month to help 8 million more people become homeowners by the year 2000 and raise the ownership rate to 67.5%.

“We’re going in the right direction,” Cisneros said. “It’s probably too early to try to draw more conclusions than that.”

Clinton’s homeownership program teams officials in banking, real estate, construction, government and community groups to make buying houses cheaper and easier. It aims to increase awareness of alternatives to down payments, such as lease-purchase plans, and to streamline the loan process and lower closing costs.

While the overall homeownership rate has gone up since the end of 1994, the rates for minority homeowners dropped slightly since then, from 43.7% to 43.5%.

Rates for homeowners under 35 and those with lower incomes fell slightly since December, 1994, as well, to 56.9% and 48.6%, respectively.

But those rates represented an increase over the quarter that ended in March.

For that period, the rate for minority homeowners was 42.9%, while rates for homeowners under 35 and poor families were 56.2% and 48.1%, respectively.