“Since the baby boom generation, young people are far more likely to co-reside in somebody’s household than they are to own or rent,” said Rosenbaum.

The report, “Cohort Trends in Housing and Household Formation Since 1990,” is to be included in a new book published by the Russell Sage Foundation later this year, titled The Lost Decade? Social Change in the U.S. after 2000.

Rosenbaum studied several birth-based cohorts in terms of the housing market, beginning with the Great Depression babies on through to baby boomers, and ending with millennials, whom Rosenbaum refers to as the echo boomers—those born between 1986 and 1995.

“Cohorts matter because as they go through their lifecycles they go through different historical conditions,” said Rosenbaum, citing the Depression and World War II as examples.

Rosenbaum said that the conventional homeownership rate derived from U.S. Census data could produce misleading conclusions because it is based solely on households rather than individuals. Thus, that homeownership rate doesn’t take into consideration young adults who cannot financially strike out on their own who end up living with others.

To address this, Rosenbaum analyzed “headship” patterns, as well as home ownership. In other words, at what point in a person’s life cycle did he or she become the head of an independent household, and then possibly a home owner? When analyzed in this manner, Rosenbaum said, the evidence is overwhelming that recent generational cohorts face great disadvantages and that generational inequalities in home ownership are growing dramatically.

Rosenbaum supplemented her data with surveys from the General Social Survey, which is conducted every other year by the National Opinion Research Center and which asks a range of attitudinal questions.

“I use the survey data to isolate the cohort effect from the effect of the time period and the simple effect of age,” said Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum noted that baby boomers were the first cohort since the Depression to experience unequal results, with more people competing for less housing. She said the effect has wide-ranging implications.

“Since the baby boomers had a tough time getting housing, they had to accommodate for the situation so they delayed marriage and having children,” she said. “Gen X and Gen Y also have similar problems, but the data I have shows that they exemplify economic insecurity—and the income for the next generation will be even worse off.”

In the concluding remarks of her report, Rosenbaum noted that though the data clearly reflects escalating housing inequality across generations, with recent cohorts (sometimes called Gen Z) doing much worse than their parents, the census doesn’t count people without a fixed residence. Those who hop from the couch of one friend to the couch of another don’t get counted at all, so the true extent of the gap may be hidden.

The American Dream of owning a home is suffering a failure to launch for many in Generation X and Y, and it’s not looking promising for the millennials either, according to a new study conducted by Emily Rosenbaum, Ph.D., professor of sociology.

“Since the baby boom generation, young people are far more likely to co-reside in somebody’s household than they are to own or rent,” said Rosenbaum.

The report, “Cohort Trends in Housing and Household Formation Since 1990,” is to be included in a new book published by the Russell Sage Foundation later this year, titled The Lost Decade? Social Change in the U.S. after 2000.

Rosenbaum studied several birth-based cohorts in terms of the housing market, beginning with the Great Depression babies on through to baby boomers, and ending with millennials, whom Rosenbaum refers to as the echo boomers—those born between 1986 and 1995.

“Cohorts matter because as they go through their lifecycles they go through different historical conditions,” said Rosenbaum, citing the Depression and World War II as examples.

Rosenbaum said that the conventional homeownership rate derived from U.S. Census data could produce misleading conclusions because it is based solely on households rather than individuals. Thus, that homeownership rate doesn’t take into consideration young adults who cannot financially strike out on their own who end up living with others.

To address this, Rosenbaum analyzed “headship” patterns, as well as home ownership. In other words, at what point in a person’s life cycle did he or she become the head of an independent household, and then possibly a home owner? When analyzed in this manner, Rosenbaum said, the evidence is overwhelming that recent generational cohorts face great disadvantages and that generational inequalities in home ownership are growing dramatically.

Rosenbaum supplemented her data with surveys from the General Social Survey, which is conducted every other year by the National Opinion Research Center and which asks a range of attitudinal questions.

“I use the survey data to isolate the cohort effect from the effect of the time period and the simple effect of age,” said Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum noted that baby boomers were the first cohort since the Depression to experience unequal results, with more people competing for less housing. She said the effect has wide-ranging implications.

“Since the baby boomers had a tough time getting housing, they had to accommodate for the situation so they delayed marriage and having children,” she said. “Gen X and Gen Y also have similar problems, but the data I have shows that they exemplify economic insecurity—and the income for the next generation will be even worse off.”

In the concluding remarks of her report, Rosenbaum noted that though the data clearly reflects escalating housing inequality across generations, with recent cohorts (sometimes called Gen Z) doing much worse than their parents, the census doesn’t count people without a fixed residence. Those who hop from the couch of one friend to the couch of another don’t get counted at all, so the true extent of the gap may be hidden. 

That was the conclusion of research by Emily Rosenbaum, Ph.D., professor of sociology, whose report on home ownership was published in March by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University as part of the US2010 project.

Homeownership, in fact, saw a dramatic decrease for certain groups, between 2001 and 2011, according to Rosenbaum’s report, “Home Ownership’s Wild Ride, 2001-2011.

Between the housing-market collapse and the Great Recession, Rosenbaum found that Generations X and Y are homeowners at a lower rate than their older cohorts were at the same stage of life. In addition, Black households experienced lower rates of homeownership than their White counterparts.

Homeownership among lower income and less educated households also experienced a hit, widening the gap between the high and low socioeconomic households.

“We haven’t seen a drop in the overall home ownership rate this large since the Great Depression,” Rosenbaum wrote. “Losses were particularly large among black households, less-educated households, and households in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. The unequal pattern of loss considerably widened the ownership gaps between black and white households, highly educated and less-educated, and high- and low-income households.”

It was also noteworthy, Rosenbaum said, that those same groups did not participate in the surge in home ownership during the first half of the decade. Low-income households, black households and non-college-degree households saw “little change” in ownership between 2001 and 2005.

“In contrast, increases of two, three, or four points typified the experience of households headed by college graduates, non-black households, and households in the top 20 percent of the income distribution,” Rosenbaum wrote.

Rosenbaum’s findings are based on six years of data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS; 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011), capturing the periods immediately before and after the housing bubble’s burst. The full US2010 policy brief can be downloaded here:http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Projects/Reports.htm

US2010, Discover America in a New Century, is being funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and coordinated through Brown University. The project, a two-year study which will culminate with a book, got underway when the 2010 census showed virtually no change since 2000 in black and white segregation in the housing markets.

Rosenbaum, a housing inequality expert and author of The Housing Divide: How Generations of Immigrants Fare in New York’s Housing Markets (New York University Press, 2006), will be heading up the research on “How We Are Housed.” Drawing from a few different sources of data, Rosenbaum will analyze recent trends and differentials in home ownership, and housing and neighborhood quality, for the decade 2000-2010.

“Home ownership is widely recognized as a barometer of the U.S. population’s and economy’s well being,” wrote Rosenbaum. “And thus has long been integral to policy making.”

But home ownership, she said, was only “part of the total picture.” Neighborhood safety, access to services such as good schools, and a deteriorating housing unit can adversely affect quality of life and health, she said.

“The persistence of racial/ethnic differentials in housing and neighborhood quality may be a partial explanation for [the]continued patterns of inequality,” said Rosenbaum.

What was surprising about the U.S. 2010 census is that the recent decade of stagnation in black-white segregation followed two decades (1980s, 1990s) of growing diversity. Why has it stopped? This is one of the things the study will look at.

Beyond housing, said John Logan, Ph.D., professor of sociology at Brown and director of US2010, the concluding publication will include studies on immigration, segregation, economics, education, aging and the changing American family, among others.

“US2010 . . . tackles questions of change in American society not from the perspective of one scholar or one topic, but with the expertise of a nationwide team of scholars who were brought together for this purpose,” he said.

—Janet Sassi

Unless, according to Emily Rosenbaum, Ph.D., professor of sociology and anthropology, you are black.

Rosenbaum’s book, The Housing Divide: How Generations of Immigrants Fare in New York’s Housing Markets (New York University Press, 2006), analyzes data on upward mobility as it relates to housing of different racial and ethnic groups across three generations in New York City. What she and her co-author, Samantha Friedman, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Northeastern University, found was that for white, Latino and Asian immigrants, housing improves or remains the same over generations. For black immigrants, however, it declines.

“When you walk down the street in New York, you see people from everywhere, and of every different look and skin color,” Rosenbaum said. “But in terms of the neighborhoods where we live, New York City is incredibly segregated. It is one of the few metropolitan areas that has maintained an extremely high level of segregation since the 1970s, where, nationally, segregation has moderately declined.”

In fact, Rosenbaum’s research puts the city’s “index of dissimilarity” at .84 compared to a national average of about .60. More than 8 out of 10 blacks or whites would have to move out of their segregated neighborhoods in order to achieve integration between the two groups. While the segregation of foreign-born blacks from whites is nearly as high, curiously foreign- and native-born blacks tend not to share the same neighborhoods.

What this pattern of housing means is that, on average, the black immigrants will experience the best housing, she said, with a worsening in conditions in future generations.

“If you have, say, an African or Caribbean accent, or some other way of demonstrating to the outside world that you are not native born, you get treated better—better job promotions, better housing,” Rosenbaum said. “You are more acceptable. You are considered to be a hard worker, and of higher social status than native-born blacks. However, once the rising first generation loses that marker of ethnicity such as an accent, and it just blends in, it’s rather grim.

“They become African-Americans, and African-Americans remain relegated to the lower rung of society.”

Surprisingly, the highest incidences of housing segregation exist primarily in the Rust Belt—those hubs of manufacturing that experienced deep shifts in demographics as African-Americans migrated from the South during the 1940s and 1950s for better opportunities.

Once a neighborhood reaches a 5 percent black population, Rosenbaum said, it begins to experience white flight. The levels of white flight are lower in Western cities because the black population is less than 5 percent in many urban areas. In the South, Rosenbaum said that old patterns of employment still affect neighborhoods, which are more integrated than in the North.

“In terms of residence,” she said, “slaves would live close by to the whites they worked for, so they were actually sharing neighborhoods, if not lives,” she said.

And the suburbs don’t integrate much better than urban areas. As blacks move into inner-ring suburbs, white flight pushes other populations further out, she said.

“Housing really is a key indicator of socioeconomic status,” she said. “The consequences of homeownership are serious because home equity makes a major contribution to any given household’s wealth portfolio. It can be leveraged to provide things that contribute to your future generations, such as a college education.”

Rosenbaum’s research also shows that, among Latino immigrants, non-black Hispanics fare better than black Latinos. “This is the legacy of racial discrimination and stratification,” Rosenbaum said.

Earlier this year, Rosenbaum and co-author Friedman were guests on a radio talk show in which people called in to comment on their research findings. During the show, Rosenbaum spoke with a black man of Caribbean descent who had a white girlfriend. When looking for housing on his own, he told Rosenbaum and Friedman, he was steered to poorer neighborhoods; when his girlfriend joined him, however, they were steered to more affluent areas.

Such racial steering, Rosenbaum said, is illegal but infrequently prosecuted because the onus is on the victim to prove discrimination, and that can be a long, drawn out process.

“Segregation starts on a very personal level,” she said. “If fair housing legislation was more easily navigated, enforced or strengthened—so that real estate agents didn’t know they could get away with it—then it wouldn’t happen as much.”

In the meantime, Rosenbaum said that America’s racial segregation is liable to be made worse in the coming decades if demographictrends continue.

“Without changes,” she said, “the future of racial inequality will increasingly isolate blacks from all other groups.”

In all those novels and movies, the immigrant experience in America is the stuff of dreams. Whether you come to America on a plane, a boat, or slip under a fence, the pattern of assimilation remains the same as it was in the 19th century and early 20th—you and your U.S.-born children’s lives improve over generations.

Unless, according to Emily Rosenbaum, Ph.D., professor of sociology and anthropology, you are black.

Rosenbaum’s book, The Housing Divide: How Generations of Immigrants Fare in New York’s Housing Markets (New York University Press, 2006), analyzes data on upward mobility as it relates to housing of different racial and ethnic groups across three generations in New York City. What she and her co-author, Samantha Friedman, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Northeastern University, found was that for white, Latino and Asian immigrants, housing improves or remains the same over generations. For black immigrants, however, it declines.

“When you walk down the street in New York, you see people from everywhere, and of every different look and skin color,” Rosenbaum said. “But in terms of the neighborhoods where we live, New York City is incredibly segregated. It is one of the few metropolitan areas that has maintained an extremely high level of segregation since the 1970s, where, nationally, segregation has moderately declined.”

In fact, Rosenbaum’s research puts the city’s “index of dissimilarity” at .84 compared to a national average of about .60. More than 8 out of 10 blacks or whites would have to move out of their segregated neighborhoods in order to achieve integration between the two groups. While the segregation of foreign-born blacks from whites is nearly as high, curiously foreign- and native-born blacks tend not to share the same neighborhoods.

What this pattern of housing means is that, on average, the black immigrants will experience the best housing, she said, with a worsening in conditions in future generations.

“If you have, say, an African or Caribbean accent, or some other way of demonstrating to the outside world that you are not native born, you get treated better—better job promotions, better housing,” Rosenbaum said. “You are more acceptable. You are considered to be a hard worker, and of higher social status than native-born blacks. However, once the rising first generation loses that marker of ethnicity such as an accent, and it just blends in, it’s rather grim.

“They become African-Americans, and African-Americans remain relegated to the lower rung of society.”

Surprisingly, the highest incidences of housing segregation exist primarily in the Rust Belt—those hubs of manufacturing that experienced deep shifts in demographics as African-Americans migrated from the South during the 1940s and 1950s for better opportunities.

Once a neighborhood reaches a 5 percent black population, Rosenbaum said, it begins to experience white flight. The levels of white flight are lower in Western cities because the black population is less than 5 percent in many urban areas. In the South, Rosenbaum said that old patterns of employment still affect neighborhoods, which are more integrated than in the North.

“In terms of residence,” she said, “slaves would live close by to the whites they worked for, so they were actually sharing neighborhoods, if not lives,” she said.

And the suburbs don’t integrate much better than urban areas. As blacks move into inner-ring suburbs, white flight pushes other populations further out, she said.

“Housing really is a key indicator of socioeconomic status,” she said. “The consequences of homeownership are serious because home equity makes a major contribution to any given household’s wealth portfolio. It can be leveraged to provide things that contribute to your future generations, such as a college education.”

Rosenbaum’s research also shows that, among Latino immigrants, non-black Hispanics fare better than black Latinos. “This is the legacy of racial discrimination and stratification,” Rosenbaum said.

Earlier this year, Rosenbaum and co-author Friedman were guests on a radio talk show in which people called in to comment on their research findings. During the show, Rosenbaum spoke with a black man of Caribbean descent who had a white girlfriend. When looking for housing on his own, he told Rosenbaum and Friedman, he was steered to poorer neighborhoods; when his girlfriend joined him, however, they were steered to more affluent areas.

Such racial steering, Rosenbaum said, is illegal but infrequently prosecuted because the onus is on the victim to prove discrimination, and that can be a long, drawn out process.

“Segregation starts on a very personal level,” she said. “If fair housing legislation was more easily navigated, enforced or strengthened—so that real estate agents didn’t know they could get away with it—then it wouldn’t happen as much.”

In the meantime, Rosenbaum said that America’s racial segregation is liable to be made worse in the coming decades if demographictrends continue.

“Without changes,” she said, “the future of racial inequality will increasingly isolate blacks from all other groups.”

– Janet Sassi