Click for EnlargementShelter Indicator
by Patrick A. Simmons
(Updated April 23, 2001)
The United States entered the 21st century with a booming housing sector characterized by rapidly expanding homeownership, record home sales, strong house price appreciation, and vigorous housing construction. Although recent housing market conditions are atypical in their strength, they are consistent with long-term trends in American postwar housing progress. The Calvert-Henderson Shelter Indicator reveals that these trends have left the great majority of Americans well-housed, but have stopped short of eliminating all of the nation's housing problems.
The first major postwar trend is substantial gains in homeownership. The national homeownership rate reached an all-time high of 67.4 percent in 2000, up from 43.6 percent in 1940. During the last three years of the 1990s, more households became homeowners than in any other three-year period in U.S. history.
The second trend involves major reductions in overcrowded and physically inadequate housing, which were major concerns of housing reformers in the early 20th century. In 1940, 20 percent of households experienced overcrowding and 45 percent lived in housing with incomplete plumbing. By the end of the century fewer than 3 percent of Americans experienced these housing ills.
As physically inadequate and overcrowded housing has become less prevalent, the nation has turned its attention to other housing-related problems such as affordability and spatially concentrated poverty. Affordability problems are particularly acute for poor and near-poor renters, over 4 million of whom pay more than half of their incomes for rent. Housing affordability problems among poor households is one factor behind the half to three-quarters of a million people who are homeless at any given moment. Millions of Americans also live in urban neighborhoods plagued by poverty rates of 40 percent or more.
Just as progress has been uneven across the different types of housing problems, so too has it been uneven for different population groups. Inequality is probably nowhere more evident than in the persistent disparities in housing outcomes across racial and ethnic groups. For example, compared with their white counterparts African American households are about 35 percent less likely to own their homes and African American renters are about 20 percent more likely to experience severe housing problems. African Americans are more than 20 times more likely than whites to live in extremely poor city neighborhoods. Such differences in housing outcomes contribute to broader patterns of socioeconomic inequality across population groups.
Thus, although the United States has made substantial gains in homeownership and has nearly eradicated two major housing problems, not all groups have shared equally in the nation's housing progress. Furthermore, far too many Americans of all demographic groups are still beset by problems of excessive housing cost burdens, homelessness, or stifling neighborhood distress to declare complete victory in the shelter sector.