Home Sweet Home?

Holman Jenkins argues against the conventional wisdom of the universal good of home ownership in today's Wall Street Journal (sub req):

But a home financed by a mortgage is not just an asset. It's also a liability. We owe thanks to Carolina Katz Reid, then a graduate student at University of Washington, for a 2004 study of what she dubbed the "low income homeownership boom." She considered a simple question -- "whether or not low-income households benefit from owning a home." Her discoveries are bracing:

Of low-income households from a nationally representative sample who became homeowners between 1977 and 1993, fully 36% returned to renting in two years, and 53% in five years. Suggesting their sojourn among the homeowning was not a happy one, few returned to homeownership in later years.

Even among those who held on to their homes for 10 years, the average price-appreciation gain was 30% -- less than if their money had been invested in Treasury bills. This meager capital gain was about half that enjoyed by middle-income homeowners.

A typical low-income household might spend half the family income on mortgage costs, leaving less money for a rainy day or investing in education. Their less-marketable homes apparently also tended to tie them down, making them less likely to relocate for a job. Ms. Reid's counterintuitive discovery was that higher-income households were "twice as likely to move long distance if they're unemployed."

Almost needless to add, the great squarer of circles for middle-income homeowners, the mortgage-interest deduction, won't turn a house into a paying proposition for those with little income to shelter.

Bottom line: Homeownership likely has had an exceedingly poor payoff for millions of low-income purchasers, perhaps even blighting the prospects of what might otherwise be upwardly mobile families.

Might be time to rethink the notion that providing an easier path to home ownership for low-income people is a method to improve their circumstances.

Update: King has more on this matter.