Homeownership in the United States remained flat last quarter, staying at its lowest level in nearly two decades and underscoring the dominant role investors have played in the housing recovery.
The nation’s homeownership rate was 65.1% on a seasonally adjusted level in the third quarter, unchanged from the second quarter, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Homeownership fell from a 65.3% rate in the third quarter last year. Besides the second quarter of this year, home ownership hasn’t been this low since the last three months of 1995.
Increasingly, Americans dependent on low-paying and part-time jobs cannot afford to purchase a home because their income qualification fails to meet the necessary risk of default criteria no matter the level of the interest rate on the mortgage. This will increasingly be a problem for those in the middle-class as tectonic shifts in the technologies of production destroy their jobs and devalue the worth of their labor.
When will this nation realize that the impact of technology will continue to shift the production of products and services off of human labor onto non-human productive capital––human intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. No longer will income from a job be sufficient to meet the criteria of purchasing a home on the basis of a home mortgage loan. Fewer and fewer American will qualify. We need to focus on ownership creation in the FUTURE productive capital economic growth of the country and create new individual ownership of the corporations that produce the products and provide the services so that people can benefit financially from a second income and new source of income from wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital assets.
