“The American Dream” is a phrase we often apply to home ownership although the historian that made this expression popular, James Truslow Adams, defined it differently in his 1931 book Epic of America. According to Wikipedia, in his book Adams defined “The American Dream” as a better and richer life for every man through social order and not material possessions. Regardless of it’s original definition, home ownership became a part of the American dream in the 20th century. In spite of the fact that we are on the tail-end of a five-year housing slump, the “American Dream” appears to be hanging on as, according to 2011 Census Data, 66.1 percent of Americans own a home and, while this is no doubt a fairly significant decline from the peak of home ownership around the middle part of the decade, it is down only slightly from 2000 when 66.2 percent owned a home.
What has changed, however, in the past 11 years, is the face of the home-owner in terms of race. As the table below shows, over the past 11 years Asian’s have seen the largest increase in home-ownership rates and, while whites saw an increase as well, the home-ownership rate among blacks declined significantly.
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