Homeownership Rate Drops to 53 Year Low

New U.S. Census Bureau data on housing numbers reveal a significant change in how the American dream of homeownership has played out, with fewer homes occupied by owners, while an increasing number are lived in by renters. The trend has been happening for decades and now the homeownership rate has reached the lowest share since 1970 at 63.1%. 

It represents a decrease by 2 percentage points from 10 years ago in 2010 when it was 65.1%. In contrast, the remaining 36.9% of occupied housing units or 46.8 million were renter-occupied, up from 40.7 million in 2010, which repeated a pattern between 2000 and 2010.

Exceptions exist, and five states experienced an increase in their homeownership rate between 2010 and 2020 with Hawaii showing the biggest percentage-point increase of 1.2%, followed by Alaska at 0.8%, Idaho, 0.5%, South Carolina, 0.4% and Wyoming, 0.1%. The highest homeownership rate went to West Virginia with 72.6% owning, followed by Maine at 71.1%. The lowest rate went to the District of Columbia at 38.3%.

The homeowner vacancy rate—the proportion of homeowner housing inventory vacant for sale–in 2020 decreased 0.9 percentage points from the prior decade to 1.5% as more rented homes. The largest state declines occurred in Nevada at -3.7%, followed by Arizona, -2.2%, Idaho, -1.9%, Georgia, -1.8% and Florida, -1.8%. The area that ranked among the 10 largest household populations and had the highest rental vacancy rate of 10.4% was the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land area in Texas. It was the only area in 2020 with a rate greater than 10%.

Of the 4.4 million U.S. vacant units in 2020—whether for seasonal, recreational or occasional use, this number was down from 4.6 million a decade before. Florida again led states in absolute number of such units with the state’s 667,000 homes representing 15.3% of the country’s units in 2020, followed by California, New York, Michigan and Texas.