Using Homeownership to Advance Racial & Health Equity
Highlights
- Owning a home can provide individuals and families with stability and a path to building wealth.
- Many low-income households and people of color are shut out of opportunities to own their home.
- Abt’s analysis identified strategies for expanding access to sustainable homeownership.
Americans from diverse backgrounds dream of owning a home. Homeownership can provide a sense of independence, financial and housing stability, and a pathway to building wealth for current and future generations. However, despite these widely shared aspirations, discriminatory housing and lending policies—and continuing inequities in wealth and income levels—have put homeownership out of reach for many people of color. Moreover, many who successfully purchase a home struggle to maintain ownership over the long-term, which limits their ability to build wealth and reap the full benefits of homeownership, and can undermine not only the social and economic well-being of homeowners but their families, and communities.
In a landscape analysis, Abt explored how homeownership can help to advance health equity, racial equity, and social and economic well-being. The analysis reviews the existing evidence on homeownership and health, and identifies the key attributes of homeownership needed to advance health and racial equity. The analysis describes a wide range of federal, state, and local policies and programs that can promote affordable and sustainable homeownership opportunities, with a particular focus on strategies to support homeownership for people of color.
Abt produced a landscape analysis that describes specific opportunities to use homeownership to offer stability and wealth-building opportunities for individuals and families, while also fostering healthy, diverse, and economically vibrant communities. The analysis identifies a diverse set of actions that practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders can take to support homeownership in their communities. The Summary of Recommendations highlights a few of the highest-priority actions in the report.
To complement the landscape analysis, Abt also produced a set of Policy Briefs that offer deeper insights into four specific homeownership challenges: closing the “appraisal gap” for low-cost homes, promoting shared equity homeownership models, addressing property title challenges, and improving the affordability and stability of manufactured homes.
Landscape Analysis:
- Advancing Health and Racial Equity through Homeownership – Summary of Recommendations
- Advancing Health and Racial Equity through Homeownership – Full Report
Policy Briefs:
- Addressing Appraisal Gaps and Expanding Access to Small-Dollar Mortgages
- Expanding the Availability of Shared-Equity Homeownership
- Expanding Resident and Nonprofit Ownership of Manufactured Home Parks
- Addressing Tangled Title Issues
Related Highlights:
WEBINAR: Promoting Health and Racial Equity Through Sustainable Homeownership