Black homeowners did poorly during the Obama presidency

The nation's homeownership rate appears to be stabilizing as people rebound from the 2007 recession that left millions unemployed and home values underwater, but a new report finds that African-Americans aren't sharing in the recovery. The report by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies said that the disparity between whites and blacks is at its highest in 70-plus years of data. By 2016, the African-American homeowner rate had fallen to 42.2% and lagged 29.7 percentage points behind whites, nearly a percentage point higher than in 2015. In 2004, the pinnacle of US homeownership, three-quarters of whites and nearly half of blacks owned homes, according to the Harvard study. An analysis of Census Bureau statistics shows that some pockets of the Midwest and California had the lowest homeownership rates for African-Americans, while some areas of the South had the highest.