Atlanta ranked as best US city for Black homebuyers

Matt Reynolds, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Oct 10, 2024

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New research published Thursday found Atlanta is the best city for Black people who want to get on the housing ladder. But it also reinforced findings on the gulf between white and Black homeownership in the US.

The report published by Columbia, Miss.-based Mortgage Research Center suggests the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta area is the most inclusive in the country, with around 39,000 Black homebuyers and about 50,000 approved applicants for mortgages in 2022 and 2023.

Analysts used four metrics to reach an inclusivity ranking: the number of successful home purchases; the total number of Black homebuyer mortgage applicants; the approval rate; and the spread between Black and white mortgage approval rates.

To reach its conclusions, the analysts studied mortgage and origination data from 393 metro statistical areas.

Atlanta produced more Black homebuyers than any other city, and along with nine other cities it accounts for about 36% of all home purchases by those buyers in the US.

Atlanta, Washington D.C., and Dallas-Fort Worth accounted for almost 16% of Black homebuyers in the U.S. from 2022 to 2023, the report said.

However, the mortgage approval rate gap between Black and white homebuyers is still 9.5% in metro Atlanta, according to the report. That’s compared to the U.S. approval rate gap of 13.3%.

The report suggests there is still in long way to go to achieve parity, finding Black homebuyers are still twice as likely to be denied a mortgage than white homebuyers.

“Homeownership is often seen as the cornerstone of generational wealth in America, but Black Americans are still facing signiﬁcant barriers when it comes to owning a home,” the group’s lead analyst Tim Lucas said in a statement. “Although Black people account for nearly 14% of the U.S. population, they represented just 8% of home purchase mortgages in 2022 and 2023.”

National Association of Realtors found in 2023 that 73% of white Americans own a home in comparison to 44% of Black Americans, the largest gap in a decade.

In a June 2023 report, the Atlanta Regional Commission said metro Atlanta has the highest rate of Black homeownership among the most populous cities in the country. Despite that, homeownership rates among Black people are still lower than rates among other races and ethnicities.

The Black homeownership rate in metro Atlanta is 25 percentage points lower than the white homeownership rate — while the gap is around 30 percentage points in Cobb and Gwinnett counties, and almost 25 percentage points in Clayton, the commission found.

Mortgage Research Center described some of the challenges facing Black homebuyers including the debt-to-income ratios facing first-generation college graduates who are solely responsible for their debt, lower credit scores, as well as the impact of living in historically redlined communities.

“Even though banks claim not to be cherry picking or profiling, if a neighborhood is predominantly Black and they choose not to work in that area, or give higher interest loans in that area, they are still redlining — just in a different way,” Odest Riley, CEO of California-based real estate brokerage and lending firm WLM Financial, told Mortgage Research Center.