White Suburbanization and African-American Home Ownership, 1940-1980

Abstract

Between 1940 and 1980, the rate of homeownership among African-American households increased by close to 40 percentage points. Most of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership was facilitated by the filtering of the urban housing stock as white households moved to the suburbs, particularly in the slower growing cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Our OLS and IV estimates imply that up to one half of the national increase in black homeownership over the period can be attributed to white suburbanization.