Resource Category: Housing and Homeownership

The authors find that homeownership rates are similar between Black immigrant households and native-born Black households, but rates vary greatly across specific Black immigrant groups due to factors like country of origin, context of immigration, age of homebuyer, and geographic location.

Notably, suburban communities are where more Black immigrant households own homes than any other geographic location nationally, and this trend holds true for metro Boston.

Massachusetts also has one of the fastest growing Black immigrant diasporas in the country, with immigrants from countries including Cape Verde, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic gravitating towards a small cluster of suburban communities and cities outside Boston. The authors point out that on one hand, these emerging suburban immigrant enclaves can offer unique resources and services to meet the needs of the specific diaspora of people who settle there, but on the other hand, this pattern may also indicate blocked opportunity from homeownership for Black immigrants in other parts of metro Boston.

Because households of color tend to have lower incomes and are less likely to inherit wealth or receive financial support from relatives, down payment assistance programs could help up to 1.7 million “mortgage-ready Black renters” nationally who could otherwise afford monthly mortgage payments but require assistance overcoming the initial cash hurdle of a down payment.

Researchers also find that down payment assistance (DPA) programs in the United States have been “scattershot,” supporting a limited number of families, at best — and supporting predatory lending, at worst.

Since the Great Recession, down payment assistance programs have become more mainstream, with many new state and local programs emerging. The authors caution that, with rising prices and extreme supply constraints, there is a risk that DPA would be capitalized into higher home prices, mitigating its effectiveness. But they believe that the potential benefits of an expansive, yet highly targeted, program outweigh those risks.

The authors argue that Black homeowners face different barriers to accessing homeownership in different localities. Thus local policy solutions, in conjunction with federal ones, are needed.

In a high-cost region like Greater Boston, interventions along this vein could include reforming local land-use policies to encourage housing production, particularly of smaller, more affordable homes. At the federal scale, reform is needed to create a more equitable financing system, such as developing a new credit scoring system and further incentivizing banks to fairly serve communities of color.