Looking at Pew Hispanic Center data on minority home ownership, starting in 1995 but including the recent bust, the Wall Street Journal views the glass as half-full, with the headline "Housing Boom Aided Minorities", and the lead paragraph:
Minorities in the U.S. increased their levels of homeownership at a faster clip than whites during the recent housing boom, according to a new report, and narrowed the ownership gap with the majority despite taking a bigger hit during the subsequent bust.Homeownership among all groups rose over the last decade:
As of 2008, 48.9% of all Hispanic heads of households owned a home, up from 41.9% in 1995. During the same period, black homeownership climbed to 47.5% from 42.1%. Among Asians -- who raised their homeownership level faster than any other group -- 59.1% owned a home last year compared with 49.1% in 1995. Homeownership among whites stood at 74.9% in 2008, up from 70.5% in 1995.The recent bad news is fairly prominent in the 5th paragraph, "Since the housing bust, however, homeownership levels for minorities have fallen more steeply than for whites..." despite a reasonable balance pverall, the article has an optimistic tone, with lots of uses of the words "climb", "jumped", etc.
Based on the exact same data, The New York Times sees the glass as half empty, with the headline "Homeownership Losses Are Greatest Among Minorities", and the lead sentence "...gains made in homeownership by African-Americans and native-born Latinos have been eroding faster in the economic downturn than those of whites.... The fourth paragraph emphasizes the declines in the past few years:
After peaking at 69 percent in 2004, the rate of homeownership for all American households declined to 67.8 percent in 2008. For African-American households, it fell to 47.5 percent in 2008 from 49.4 percent in 2004. Latinos, native and foreign-born together, had a longer period of growth, with homeownership rising until 2006, to 49.8 percent, before falling to 48.9 percent last year. Homeownership for native-born Latinos fell to 53.6 percent from a high of 56.2 percent in 2005.The good news about the overall increase since 1995 is burned halfway down the piece in the 9th paragraph, and immediately followed by a "but" clause...
There is no doubt in my mind that the NYT article is excessively and deliberately downbeat. They use the word decline 5 times, and fall or fell 3 times. To my mind, most people looking at the Pew data would say "gee, that's going up"Even with the decline, the rate for all groups together remains higher than before the boom, with nearly 68 percent of American households owning homes last year, up from 64 percent in 1994.
The gaps between white and minority households remain significant...
Both articles point out that minorities used sub-prime loans disproportionately to increase their home ownership.
2 comments:
Hi,
The problem is, when do you want to use as the baseline? If you use 1935 as the baseline, things have clearly gotten a lot better. If you use 2000 as the baseline, things may have actually gotten a bit worse.
Another problem is that the crisis in home loans has not worked itself out yet. It's an interesting question, whether or not when the crisis is mostly over, US middle and lower middle income homeowners will be in a position better than or comparable to their situation in 1995.
Just saying, as a someone who is not optimistic, that we're a long way from figuring out the effects of this crisis. Given that the end result is still unknown, it doesn't seem we know enough to judge whether the WSJ or the NYT is correct.
Ray,
I believe there are many studies that successful businessmen tend to be optimists. You sort of need to be. They would tend to have conservative attitudes. "I can succeed at this, just don't tax or regulate me too much".
Conversely, one could argue that liberals are more pessimistic "I may fail, give me some safety net or insurance, and regulate my competition to keep it fair".
Both sides have valid points. But if optimism leads to success, why not be a (reasonable) optimist?
Then, we have some who ditz and say "we don't know enough". :-)
At some point you have to decide and move forward. For the record, I think the French revolution was a good thing, I'm not still thinking about it like Zhou Enlai.
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