Cohort Momentum and Future Homeownership: The Outlook to 2050

Dowell Myers
Hyojung Lee
University of Southern California

It would seem preposterous that the national homeownership rate could fall by 20 percentage points or more during the next 35 years. Homeownership is an accumulated status tied to the adult lifecycle and its aggregate changes are very slow moving, unlike indicators such as the unemployment rate. During the past 40 years, excepting the brief bubble interlude of the early 2000s, the U.S. homeownership rate has not varied more than 4 percentage points, ranging from 62 to 66 percent, depending on sources. In addition, after the national rate fell from its bubble peak of 69 percent into its more typical range, analysts were quick to declare that the homeownership rate would now remain constant for the future at its 2013 Housing Vacancy Survey (HVS) level of 65 percent (Gabriel and Rosenthal, 2015). What, then, is to keep the momentum from carrying this decline further?