Homeownership Up, but Minorities Still Lag

Although homeownership across all racial and economic lines nationwide reached record levels in 1999, minority ownership still sharply lags behind that of whites, according to a study by the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now. About 73% of white families own their homes, compared with 47% of African Americans and 45% of Latinos, the study found. The group attributed the disparity to a disproportionately high loan-rejection rate of minorities by mortgage lenders. The study, which examined the lending activities of more than 7,800 institutions nationwide, found that while the denial rate nationally for conventional home-purchase mortgages in 1999 was down 1.5% for whites, 7.5% for African Americans and 8.4% for Latinos compared with a year ago, blacks were turned down for conventional loans more than twice as often as whites in many of the country’s major metropolitan areas. “We’ve tried to find root causes for the differences between the approval rates of different racial and income groups,” said Doug Duncan, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Assn. of America. “All of our efforts in this arena are targeted toward making sure that every credit-worthy borrower has access to credit.”