State report finds Black homeownership has fallen in Minnesota over last 50 years

NINA MOINI: A new report by the State of Minnesota reaffirms what many housing researchers have known, far fewer Black Minnesotans own their homes compared to white Minnesotans, and the rate of Black homeownership has fallen since the 1970s, only widening that gap. Jeff Howison, a state demographer, recently looked at these trends in more detail, using US census data that includes more specific racial and ethnic identities. He's on the line now to talk about what he's learned. Thank you for your time this afternoon, Jeff.

JEFF HOWISON: Hi, Nina. Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: For starters, would you talk a little bit about just your job as a state demographer, and what that entails, and kind of how you it drew you to this project?

JEFF HOWISON: Sure. Well, I work in the state demography office with a couple other colleagues, and we analyze data from, generally, federal sources. Although, we also make our own data at the state level. But in this particular report on home ownership, we're using data from the US Census Bureau. And so we analyze data on a wide range of not just population numbers, but also a wide range of socioeconomic characteristics of the population in Minnesota. And I'm not an expert on homeownership. We are demographers.

NINA MOINI: Sure.

JEFF HOWISON: And so this is somewhat out of our comfort zone, but we wanted to find a way to contribute to the larger kind of conversation in Minnesota, and also nationally, on the issue of homeownership and housing affordability. And we were afforded that opportunity with a really fascinating data set that was published recently by the Census Bureau. So that's how we got into it.

NINA MOINI: Sure, and what stood out to you as that you were examining from 1970 to 2020, those 50 years? How did that rate change and how does it compare to other groups?

JEFF HOWISON: Well, as you mentioned just a second ago, the gap between white and Black homeownership, again, not only in Minnesota, but in the United States, this is something that's well known. It's not exactly breaking news that white people own their homes at a rate that is higher than Black people in our country.

But what we were able to do, as a sociologist, what we do is we generalize. We look at big patterns, and trends, and trajectories of large groups of people. But when you do that, there's always a tension. You want to be able to make broad statements, but in doing that, you risk a couple of things. You risk an oversimplification, and then you also kind of risk homogenizing people.

So when it comes to talking particularly about race, and something like homeownership, for example, when you just talk about Black and white, there's a real risk that you downplay important differences, distinctions, within these large kind of segments of the population. And so that's one thing that we really, I think, accomplished in this report, is that we're not just talking about, the White and Black gap. We're talking about the inequality and the divergence of trends kind of within these big groups as well.

NINA MOINI: So you made more specific groups because when you're filling out the census-- or a lot of forms kind force people into a box that's pretty narrow because a lot of the options are not available, and that has changed, more so in recent years. But what are some of the specific groups that you zeroed in on? And did anything stand out to you there?

JEFF HOWISON: Well, yes, there are a couple points there. For example, looking at Minnesotans of Asian descent, as you said, you get the census forms, and there's four or five, maybe six boxes that you can check off. And then in census 2020, as you may remember, they would give you a little box to write in. So you could say, yes, I'm going to check the Asian box, but I'm going to also write in Vietnamese, or Filipino, or Hmong, or whatever it may be. And so that's how we kind of get at this data.

And so in terms of the findings here, in terms of these kind of what we call detailed groups that you mentioned, it's not all bad news in Minnesota. We'll talk about Black and African-American Minnesotans, perhaps, in just a minute. But one of the interesting findings, I think, of the research shows a broad, rising rate of homeownership for not only Minnesotans of Asian descent overall as a large group, but also within these kind of subcategories, if you will, for example, Indians, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Lao, Hmong, Vietnamese.

So all of these groups since the 1990s have seen broad increases in homeownership rates, in such a way that Chinese, Filipino, and Vietnamese, people of-- heritage of those countries in Minnesota have homeownership rates that is approaching, if not equal to the statewide rate of about 70%. And so that's one of the highlights.

But in terms of Black or African-American homeownership, kind of the opposite is true. There's some quite interesting findings there. And as you said, Black homeownership in Minnesota has broadly declined since the 1960s and '70s, but this is not unique to Minnesota. This has happened pretty much all across the country.

And so this particular and broad finding in our report is, again, not going to be news to people who study this sort of thing, but one of the insights, I think, of our report is when you begin to disaggregate this big Black or African-American kind of category. And the one thing that we have seen in the data is that there have been gains made by more recent Black people coming to the United States. Particularly, people from Ethiopia and Liberia have seen gains since, let's say, over about the last 20 years.

NINA MOINI: Sure.

JEFF HOWISON: But those gains have not been realized by the US-born African-American population.

NINA MOINI: How do you think it's helpful to, perhaps, policymakers or whoever uses the data that you've compiled to have these broader groups narrowed down a little bit to show that they are not homogenous? What is your hope that your data would be used towards?

JEFF HOWISON: Well, again, we want to-- you want to be able to help to inform policymakers, to help them do their jobs by kind of pointing them in the direction of, in this case, something in which there is a pretty significant inequality. But then you also want them to be aware of these differences of the fact that, yes, although there are large gaps between Black and white people, for example, that this is not a kind of one-size-fits-all solution.

That there are a great diversity of needs and of resources within these big communities, and that hopefully this data helps to kind of allow people to kind of focus in on where the need for more resources is the greatest.

NINA MOINI: Absolutely, because the needs could be very different depending on who you talk to. Jeff, thank you very much for coming by and breaking that down for us. I really appreciate your time.

JEFF HOWISON: It's my pleasure, Nina. Thanks for having me on.

NINA MOINI: Thank you. That's Jeff Howison, Senior Research Analyst in the Minnesota State Demographic Center.