Justin Fox, Columnist

Hunting for the Perfect Rate of Homeownership

Living the American dream comes with a lot of upsides. It also has one big downside.

March 27, 2018 at 2:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

So, like, 63 to 65 percent?
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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Homeownership has all sorts of positive effects. According to a 2016 summing-up of research on the "Social Benefits of Homeownership and Stable Housing" by National Association of Realtors economists Lawrence Yun and Nadia Evangelou, it brings:

Then there's a not-so-great thing that comes with homeownership: increased unemployment. That's the conclusion of a newish paper by Federal Reserve Board economist Daniel Ringo, who combed through the employment and housing histories of a cohort of Americans who were in their teens or early 20s in 1979 and found that "home ownership is a significant hindrance to mobility, and homeowners suffer longer unemployment spells and more frequent job loss because of it."