In a report released Tuesday, Bloomberg reports that black homeownership has collapsed to an 18 year low. Bloomberg buries this brutal fact under a nonsensical headline that makes it look like a local Chicago story: “Black Homeownership Dying Where Obama Revitalized.” But four paragraphs down we not only learn about the collapse in the black homeownership rate, but that it is now almost half that of whites:
For most Americans, the real estate crash is finally behind them and personal wealth is back where it was in the boom. For blacks in the U.S., 18 years of economic progress has vanished, with a rebound in housing slipping further out of reach and the unemployment rate almost twice that of whites. The homeownership rate for blacks fell from 50 percent during the housing bubble to 43 percent in the second quarter, the lowest since 1995. The rate for whites stopped falling two years ago, settling at about 73 percent, only 3 percentage points below the 2004 peak, according to the Census Bureau.
For those in the working and middle class, if you have any wealth, it is most likely found in whatever equity you have in your home — either based on what you have paid into it, its increase in value, or both. This is why the housing crisis was and is so devastating to so many everyday Americans… of all colors.
Had Obama enacted proven economic policies after becoming president, the economy and housing market would have already rebounded and beyond. But Obama chose big government policies, and now we find ourselves in the middle of a so-called recovery that only our pathetic and subservient media could spin as “good enough.”
The sad irony is that the first black president is wreaking economic havoc on black Americans. It is not just the home ownership rate that has cratered. The poverty rate for blacks today is 28%, compared to 10% for whites. The unemployment rate for blacks is 12.6%, compared to 6.6% for whites.
As Zero Hedge points out, it was just a few days ago that Obama gave a speech celebrating the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. And yet, after a half-century of a War on Poverty and five years of a black man as president, the gap between white and black in every important economic area is still just as wide as it was trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars ago.
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