Homeownership Takes on New Meaning

As the country has emerged from the Great Recession and the Millennial generation has come of age in a new kind of housing crisis, homeownership has declined and the whole idea of homeownership has taken on a new character.

Jenny Schuetz details the contemporary "face" of homeownership in the United States—i.e., "the demographic and economic characteristics of prospective homeowners."

Schuetz calls on household-level data from the most recent American Housing Survey (AHS 2015), using new homeowners as a proxy to compare to renters and long-time homeowners, as well as new homeowners in 2001 and 2015.

Click through to the article to see data on new homeowners as broken down by age, household size, race, wealth, education, and more, as well as the characteristics of the building stock new homeowners move into in 2015. Schuetz also packages all of the findings of this analysis in three policy implications that planners will want to note.