US home ownership rates plummeted over last decade

Oct 6, 2011, 21:57 GMT

Washington - The rate of US home ownership took a nose dive over the last decade, according to a US Census report released on Thursday.

The news comes at a time when the US housing market - a major benchmark of the health of the overall economy - is flagging amid a sluggish recovery from the worst economic downturn in decades.

Some analysts said that the slide in home ownership from 2000 to 2010 - the rate decreased by 1.1 percentage points to 65.1 percent of all homes owned by their occupants - was significant.

Bloomberg financial news agency called the decrease the 'sharpest slump in a generation.'

But despite the drop, the rate of US home ownership last year stood at the second highest - the highpoint was reached in 2000 - since record keeping on the subject began more than a century ago, the census report found.

Nearly 90 percent of growth in new housing units occurred between 2000 and 2007 - the year the US economy tanked and the housing market slumped, according to Bloomberg news agency.

The number of homes, apartments and condominiums added over that decade grew 15.9 million to 131.7 million, a 13.6 percent growth rate, according to Bloomberg.

'This is unprecedented,' Patrick Newport, an IHS Global Insight economist in Boston, told Bloomberg. 'We just overbuilt by far. We've never seen anything like this.'