After 50 years, homeownership gap between white and Latino Coloradans narrows. But for Black Coloradans, it’s widened.
The U.S. is short about 3.8 million housing units relative to demand, making one of the toughest real estate markets in history
Michael Diaz-Rivera hoped $25,000 in savings and a good credit score would give him enough leverage to buy a home. But his low teacher’s salary made that nearly impossible.
“The prices in Denver were just a little too steep for me and the market was just too high,” he said in late April. “Every time that I would find a house, while I was still thinking about whether I wanted to put the money down, somebody else is coming in and they’re just buying it all out with cash. It was wild.”
It took a year, but Diaz-Rivera was finally able to purchase a home with some help from a community land trust, one of a handful of programs working to make homeownership more accessible to low and moderate income Coloradans.
“To look at my kids and know we don’t have to worry about redoing a lease, knowing that everybody’s prices are going up and that we’ve got a stable house, is just something that I’m working for,” said Diaz-Rivera, who identifies as Black. “Now, I can say my kids have a house to grow up in, something I never really had.”
Homeownership is the primary means of accumulating wealth for the average family, housing advocates said, and closing the homeownership gap is the most effective way to close the racial wealth gap.
About 48% of white residents can afford to buy the typical home in Colorado, compared with 30% of Black residents and 32% of Latino people.
In the last decade, the gaps between Black and white homeownership have widened. In 1970, the homeownership gap between Black and white households was 19 percentage points and it has grown every decade since to 32 percentage points in 2020. In 2020, 73% of white Coloradans owned their own home, compared with 41% of Black Coloradans, new Census Bureau data says.
The news is better for Latino Coloradans. In 2020, the homeownership gap between Colorado’s white and Latino households narrowed for the first time in 50 years.
Home ownership rates among Latinos are highest now in the Adams County suburbs of Commerce City and Thornton.