The American dream of home ownership is fading into the distant past under the Biden administration with mortgage applications hitting their lowest level in nearly 30 years, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said Wednesday.
UPI reports the MBA found mortgage applications declined 4.2 percent week-on-week over the seven-day period ending Aug. 18.
Joel Kan, the association’s deputy chief economist, blamed the decline on rising interest rates for helping to send the housing market into freefall, continuing a years-long trend driven by an inflationary Biden economy.
The rate on a 30-year, fixed-term mortgage stands at 7.31 percent, the highest level since December 2000. Kan observed:
Applications for home purchase mortgages dropped to their lowest level since April 1995, as homebuyers withdrew from the market due to the elevated rate environment and the erosion of purchasing power.
Low housing supply is also keeping home prices high in many markets, adding to the affordability hurdles buyers are facing.
The National Association of Realtors said Tuesday existing home sales are 16 percent below year-ago levels, which it blamed on the lack of available inventory and lending rates for driving the crisis.
“Unfortunately, both have been unfavorable to buyers,” the association’s chief economist Lawrence Yun said, according to the UPI report.
Home ownership has been a point of contention under President Joe Biden with good-credit homebuyers already forced to pay more for their mortgages to subsidize loans to higher-risk borrowers under a Biden administration rule that began to take effect in April.
As Breitbart News reported, in April 2022 less than half of Americans currently renting their home expect to ever become homeowners, a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed.
The N.Y. Fed’s 2022 Housing Survey revealed just the average likelihood of a renter expecting to own a home in the future has fallen to 43 percent, the first time that number has dropped well below 50 percent in the history of the surveys, according to economists at the New York Fed.