TheLoop21.com

By: Alyssa Giachino (Add to your loop)
Mon, 02/08/2010 - 08:49

Mortgage counselor Latonya Patterson of Charlotte, NC, helps homeowners get a lower mortgage payment in NYC last December.

Reports released last week on homeownership and unemployment continue to paint a solemn picture on the American economy as a whole, but Blacks are hurting more than everybody else.

The overall unemployment rate actually dropped in January, to 9.7 percent from 10 percent the previous two months. Although the unexpected lower jobless rate is good news, the Bureau of Labor Statics reports that we are still losing jobs -- 20,000 more gone in January. It’s an improvement over December, when we lost 150,000 jobs. And both are better than where we were a year ago when monthly job losses were in the 600,000 range, although unemployment was only 7.7 percent.

It turns out the recession has gobbled up more jobs than originally thought. We’ve lost 8.4 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, not the 7 million previously estimated.

New jobs don’t seem to be forthcoming any time soon, but perhaps we can take some comfort in things not getting worse.

But for African Americans, things might just get even worse. Instead of seeing joblessness decline, it’s going up. A year ago, the unemployment rate for Blacks was 12.8 percent. While the overall unemployment rate peaked at 10.1 percent in October and has inched downward since then, for Blacks, unemployment grew steadily through 2009 and in January continued upward to 16.5 percent.

The homeownership picture is also painful.

Foreclosures continue to chew up the market, and RealtyTrac estimates 2010 will be slightly worse than 2009, with a projected 3 million homes lost. Last summer, nearly one of every 10 mortgages was behind at least one payment. As we entered 2010, it was a feeling of deja vu on the home front. Homeownership rates are down to where they were in 2000, so basically the entire housing boom of the last decade has been wiped away.

Wiped away, that is, except for all the vacant homes that reflect the overbuilding that the boom left in its wake.

For Black homeownership, it was also a lost decade. In 2000, 46.3 percent of African Americans owned their own home. For the fourth quarter of 2009, 46 percent of Blacks owned their own home, the lowest percentage for any ethnic group.

Overall homeownership at the end of 2009 was 67.2 percent, about the same as it was at the end of 2008. Since 2006, the percent of Black homeowners has declined more quickly than for any other racial or ethnic group.

These new census figures only confirm what we already knew. The boom years of the 2000s did little to erase wealth disparities for Blacks, and the systematic efforts by lenders to sign African American families to subprime and adjustable rate mortgage loans, enabled the predictable outcome of massive home losses and the evaporation of wealth.

Alyssa Giachino is an economics writer for TheLoop21.com.