Progress Confined: Increases in Black Home Buying and the Persistence of Residential Segregation

:In recent years, increasing homeownership among blacks, as well as other minority groups, has been a major federal policy objective in the United States. Black homeownership in the US has increased significantly in the 1990s, and the benefits of such increases to minority households are likely to be considerable. However, examining black home-buying patterns in the Chicago area in the early 1990s shows that an increasing proportion of black buyers are buying into segregated or soon-to-be segregated neighborhood’s. The proportion of black home buyers in the Chicago area moving into tracts with 75% or more black buyers increased from 27% in 1990–1991 to 45% in 1995–1996. Although federal policies have shown promise in opening up financial access to minority home buyers, without more aggressive policies to open up home-selling markets, black homeownership is likely to remain highly segregated and likely to yield far fewer benefits than would more widely distributed settlement patterns.