Homeownership drops in Ohio, Dayton region

The decline is directly related to foreclosures and sub-prime lending, says housing official.

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By Ken McCall, Staff Writer Updated 9:25 AM Thursday, May 12, 2011

The effects of the housing crash are clearly visible in new census data for Ohio and the region.

The homeownership rate declined from 2000 in Ohio and in almost every city in the Dayton region, according to data released today from the 2010 census.

In 2010, 67.6 percent of homes in Ohio are occupied by their owners. That’s a decrease of 1.5 percent from 2000. The rates also declined in all but six of the larger cities and villages in Dayton’s eight-county region.

“It’s directly tied to the mortgage fiasco, the sub-prime lending fiasco and the foreclosure boom of the last decade,” said Bill Faith, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio. “It drove people out of homeownership in large numbers. I mean, you have 80,000-plus foreclosures every year, it starts to have an impact.”

The Miami Valley as a whole also saw a loss of 1.2 percentage points in the share of owner-occupied homes during the last decade. The homeownership rate dropped to 68.6 percent for the region and would have been larger without Warren County, the only county that didn’t decline.

The city in the region that showed the largest drop in the homeownership rate was, surprisingly, Beavercreek, which was one of the cities that saw the most population growth during the last decade.

Despite the growth, the Greene County suburb saw a decrease of more than 10 percentage points from 2000 to April 1, 2010, when the census was taken.

While the city added almost 1,600 new owner-occupied homes, it also added 2,533 rentals, causing the homeownership share to drop to 74.1 percent. That’s still greater than most of the cities in the region, however.

Jeff McGrath, Beavercreek’s planning director, said many of the new rentals are likely single-family homes that are owned by military people who had to move, but were caught in the housing slump.

“Military families, or anybody who comes in and out of the community for a short period of time and buys a home, was hit by the economic downturn,” McGrath said. “They have to get out in a timely basis, and they don’t want to sell their property at a loss, so they’ll rent it out and wait for the market to rebound.”

McGrath said he’s not worried about the increase in rentals. The city’s housing mix, he said, is “pretty well-balanced and should be sustainable over time to keep occupancy rates and rent rates high.”

The city of Riverside had the second-highest decline in homeownership, falling 9.1 percentage points to 57.0 percent, but officials there said they’re rather have them rented than vacant.

“Our abandoned and vacant homes are the critical point to us,” said Robert Murray, Riverside’s director of planning and economic development. “That’s effected us severely. We’re still cleaning up the mess.”

Mayor Bill Flaute said he’d rather see homebuyers want to live in the city, but hasn’t seen or heard of significant problems with rentals in Riverside, also near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

“We haven’t noticed that our houses have been going down, and we haven’t noticed a big decrease in the prices of our properties,” Flaute said. “The fact that landlords are still interested in buying houses in our communities is a good thing. It shows that they have the confidence in our community that they will get a good payback on their rental units.”

Murray said the drop in homeownership was inevitable because the rates had gotten too high.

“It’s evident that some people shouldn’t be acquiring the debt that they did to get that ownership rate to where it was,” he said.

Lobbyist: Housing market stabilizing

Faith, a lobbyist who works with state lawmakers to shape housing legislation and policy, agreed that the drop in homeownership, although painful now, should be good in he long run.

The housing bubble was caused by lenders making all kinds of risky loans, he said, often requiring little or no down payments or proof of income.

“It’s better for the industry to have risk-averse standards when they lend money,” Faith said. “It’s better for the homeowner. It’s better for the neighbors. It’s better for everybody that people who are purchasing homes have some skin in the game.”

Faith also said housing policy under the Clinton and Bush administrations set an unrealistically high goal of a 70 percent homeownership rate.

“There are plenty of people out there, now more so than ever, that it makes much more sense to rent as opposed to own,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a homeownership rate where roughly two-thirds of our households are homeowners.”

Still, he said, the housing slump has caused pain.

“We’ve all lost some of the value of our homes and nobody wants that, but in the long run we may be better off.”

Counties	2000	2010
Butler	71.6	69.7
Champaign	75.9	74.6
Clark	71.5	68.7
Darke	76.6	74.7
Greene	69.7	67.7
Miami	72.3	71.4
Montgomery	64.7	63.0
Preble	78.9	76.9
Warren	78.5	78.7
Regions	2000	2010
Dayton region	69.8	68.6
Ohio	69.1	67.6
Communities	2000	2010
Beavercreek	84.5	74.1
Bellbrook	82.6	81.6
Centerville	73.5	72.1
Dayton	52.8	49.9
Englewood	72.8	73.8
Fairborn	51.7	50.7
Huber Heights	72	71.9
Kettering	66.6	64.7
Oakwood	83.6	81.7
Springboro	86.6	85.7
Troy	60.3	59.2
Xenia	66.1	61.6