Data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that for most Hispanic and black New Jersey residents, owning a home is simply out of reach

Sixty-five percent of New Jersey State householders live in homes that they own. But for black households, that number drops to 40%. For Hispanics, the home ownership rate is even lower, at 36%, even as the community’s population has exploded in the last decade, according to data from the 2010 Census. Between 2000 and 2010, the state’s overall home ownership rate stayed roughly flat. Hispanic households saw a modest increase of about 3 percentage points, but black households saw no change. Hispanic population growth has been rapid in New Jersey and many who have come to the state in the last decade are immigrants. According to RealtyTrac, a company that monitors foreclosures nationwide, nearly all of the top 20 zip codes in New Jersey with properties in some stage of foreclosure from 2008 to 2010 were in towns such as Camden, Irvington and Newark, with heavy black and Hispanic populations. In parts of Plainfield, Paterson and Elizabeth in 2010, more than 5% of all housing units were in some stage of foreclosure. High unemployment rates have also exacerbated the financial struggles for many black residents in low-income neighborhoods. When it comes to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, data suggests that many more of those loans tended to go toward the African-American and Hispanic communities. During the housing bubble, a lot of people who became homeowners probably shouldn’t have become homeowners - many of these people were African-Americans and Latinos. But not everyone experienced setbacks. More than 61% of Asian householders in New Jersey were homeowners in 2010, an increase of nearly 59,000 over the previous decade. Home ownership rates among non-Hispanic white households grew by 1 percentage point since 2000 and remained the highest in the state at 77%.