Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home : the experiences of low-income, minority homebuyers

In this chapter, we investigate the following questions. What are the perceived benefits of homeownership? Have the original worries about homeownership held by these recent, low-income Latino and black homebuyers been justified after several years of experience owning a home? What do they perceive as the major challenges to their continued ownership? What are their expectations regarding neighborhood quality and the value of their homes? How much have they maintained and improved their homes? To what extent have they been able to build assets? Have they experienced severe financial stresses and increased indebtedness? What have been their experiences with delinquent mortgage payments, foreclosures, refinancing, predatory lenders, and other purveyors of debt? Are there significant Latino-black differences for any of the aforementioned questions? We begin the chapter with a review of the scanty extant evidence regarding low-income, minority homeowners' experiences, concerns, perceptions, and expectations. We then describe the DHA's Home Ownership Program (HOP) in which our all of our subjects participated as a means of buying their first home, although not all completed the program. We briefly describe the DHA administrative data employed as well as the surveys and focus groups we conducted in Denver. The bulk of the chapter then reports on the comprehensive battery of information we have collected from our sample of low income, minority homebuyers. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for U.S. housing policy and directions for continued research.