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Sunday, August 26, 2001

By Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Three years ago, Denise Brundage was living with her mother in Penn Hills, commuting to her job as a media representative with a Pittsburgh utility company. Owning a home was something she had often thought about but never followed through on.

But after taking a homeownership course that explained the common pitfalls along the path to buying a home, that changed. Brundage bought her first house in January 1999, a $57,000 one-story ranch house in her native Penn Hills.

"It's kind of like they hold your hand from beginning to end," said Brundage, 35. "The courses told me what the mortgage lenders would be looking for. I realized by capitalizing on this that my mortgage rates would be comparable to rental rates."

Brundage's purchase provides a snapshot of the gains in black homeownership in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania during the past decade.

Boosted by first-time buyer programs and the nation's robust economy, the number of African-American homeowners in the six-county region that includes Allegheny County grew by 12 percent during the past decade, despite the region's overall population loss, according to 2000 census figures released this month.

White homeownership in the region during the same decade grew by less than 2 percent, yet whites, by a 74 percent to 40 percent difference, remained far more likely than blacks to own their homes. Nationally, 73 percent of whites own their homes compared with 47 percent of blacks.

The census numbers for blacks include only those who did not list themselves as members of more than one race.

In the city of Pittsburgh, where white homeownership dropped by 10 percent between 1990 and 2000 and the percentage of black homeowners increased 3 percent, 60 percent of whites owned their homes vs. 36 percent of blacks.

The biggest jump regionally in both black and white homeownership came in Butler County, the only county in the region that experienced a population increase in the past decade. White homeownership increased 19 percent while black homeownership jumped more than 35 percent.

In Allegheny County, the five municipalities with the highest percentage of black homeownership during the past decade were Churchill, Penn Hills, Bethel Park, McCandless and Sewickley.

The five municipalities with the lowest percentage of black homeownership during the same period were Whitehall, McKees Rocks, Carnegie, Stowe and Edgewood.

The Urban League of Pittsburgh has been pushing classes on home-buying counseling for several years. Barbara Baulding, the league's director of housing, said the effort had resulted in as many as 225 first-time home purchases in the past six years.

The Allegheny County Economic Development office's single-family mortgage revenue bond program helped 2,645 first-time buyers move into homes between 1990 and 2000, with mortgage loans totaling $133.4 million.

One of the city's most venerable programs for first-time homebuyers is the 33-year-old Neighborhood Housing Services program. Last year, its education courses helped 250 first-time buyers move into their own homes.

That effort received a boost two years ago when the Pittsburgh Partnership Office of Fannie Mae was established, one of about 50 such offices around the country. Fannie Mae, short for Federal National Mortgage Association, is a private company that is the largest source of financing for home mortgages in the country.

The director of the local office, Howard Slaughter Jr., said the area's affordable home prices, an increasing propensity by African Americans to save money and the willingness of lenders to offer credit to them contributed to the spike in black home ownership.

"It just makes sense to buy a home here because you're going to build equity," Slaughter said. "The housing costs [in the six-county area] are some of the most affordable in the United States. From a pure marketing opportunity, where do you go? It just makes good business sense."

The inroads by local and regional African Americans in home ownership mirror national trends. The U.S. home ownership rate increased by 2 percentage points last decade, to 66.2 percent, the largest gain since the 1950s.

There were 69.8 million American homeowners by 2000. The net increase of 10.8 million homeowners during the 1990s was 50 percent greater than during the '80s and was exceeded only by the record increase of 11.9 million during the '70s.

Nevertheless, there remains what John Yinger, a professor of public administration and economics at Syracuse University, calls a home ownership gap between blacks and whites. In 1984, Yinger said, the percentage difference was 24 percent; in 2000, the difference was 26 percent.

Historically, he said, blacks have fewer resources than whites. A 1994 study showed that while the median income for black households was about $37,000, it was $178,000 for whites. In addition, 25 percent of first-time white homeowners receive family help in making a down payment on a home. Yinger said 90 percent of first-time black homeowners make their down payments without family help.

Janice Crump is senior director for a new initiative of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation to increase black home ownership. The initiative, called "With Ownership, Wealth," hopes to attract 1 million black homeowners by 2005. She said people who grow up in rental homes didn't share the same desire for homeownership that those raised in homes have.

"We want to create homeowners who then pass that legacy on to their children," Crump said. "We want to develop homeowners out of younger people."