November 30, 2014
The NYT tells us that we should still be pushing people to be homeowners, based largely on a report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, which gets much of its funding from industry groups. The editorial is in many ways a classic exercise in bad logic.
The basic point seems to be that homeowners accumulate more money on average than renters. While this is true, the relevant question is not whether homeowners accumulate more money, but rather whether homebuyers accumulate more money. The group of people who remain homeowners are a subset of the former group. A study of low income homebuyers in the 1980s and 1990s (i.e. before the bubble) found that the median period of homeownership was less than five years. While the people who remain homeowners for long periods of time were likely successful in accumulating wealth in their home, the half that left their home in less than five years almost certainly were losers due to the transactions costs (which are income to banks and realtors).
The other point worth noting is that the ability to accumulate equity in a home depends to a substantial extent on price movements. While real house prices are well below bubble peaks, they are high relative to longer term trends or rents. This raises a risk that they will decline if interest rates rise in the years ahead, as is predicted by the Congressional Budget Office and other official forecasters.
The study cited by the NYT seems almost designed to misrepresent the impact of the bubble on wealth accumulation. It finds that the median household who started in 1999 as renters and then switched to be homeowners ended up with more wealth in 2009, even if they had switched back to being renters. There are two obvious problems with this analysis. First, most of the people who bought in this period and then sold would have sold before 2007, meaning they would have sold in years when the bubble was sending prices soaring. It would be surprising if homeowners were not able to accumulate wealth if they sold near the peak of the bubble.
Furthermore, 2009 was still far from the trough of house prices. Prices did not bottom out until 2012. While this is presented as a test of the impact of homeownership under extraordinarily adverse conditions, the opposite is the case. More of the people who bought and sold in these years would be expected to be gainers than would typically be true. A better test would have included more years following the bursting of the bubble to prevent the impact of the bubble year prices from dominating the results.
The Joint Center continued to push homeownership on low and moderate income families during the bubble years. It doesn’t seem as though its pattern of behavior has changed.
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