Home ownership in Snohomish County has followed a disturbing pattern in recent decades. While 70% of White families are able to own homes, most Black and Latino families do not.
The graph below shows homeownership percentages since 1970. Rates of Black ownership were much higher in 1970 and 1980, but those numbers are misleading. Very few Black or Asian families lived in the county until more recently. In 1970, the county's population was 98.3% White. The Tulalip people comprised the largest nonWhite group, outnumbering the 1,012 African Americans and 937 Asian Americans who had found ways to live in the county. As the county the county has become more diverse since the 1990s, Black and Latino home ownership rates have declined while rates for Asian and Indigenous households have increased.
The disadvantage that Black families face in Snohomish County is made clearer when we consider income. At every income level, White families are more likely to own homes than Black families. The chart below shows ownership rates in 2018 census counts. Among families earning $100,000-$150,000 annually, 85% of Whites were homeowners compared with 69% of Blacks. The gap grew starker at more modest family income levels. For those earning between $50,000 and $75,000 in 2018, 66% of Whites were owners compared with only 47% of Blacks. And look at the difference among those earning less than $50,000. White families were almost twice as likely to be homeowners as Black families. Remarkably, 46% of White families at this modest income level were able to own homes. Here we see the effects of multigeneration wealth building. At current prices new buyers with modest incomes are shut out of homeownership unless they are converting homes long held in the family or other sources of wealth.
Homes in these calculations include condos as well as houses and ownership can mean buying with a mortgage or owning outright. The most recent years shown here are 2008 and 2018. Both represent 5-year averages of annual American Community Surveys (ACS): 2006-10 and 2016-20. The 5-year averages improve the reliability of these calculations, all of which are based on samples of the full population (5% in these and earlier decades). Because these are samples, it is unwise to report very small populations. For that reason the Latino category is not reported until 1980 and the category "Other race" is not shown here.
Race categories in these calculations treat Latino as an exclusive category. Thus the labels Black, White, Indigenous, and Asian do not include anyone who indicated Hispanic/Latino heritage. The category Asian, always complicated, includes Pacific Islanders, South Asians, and East Asians. These charts do not include persons who answered with two or more race categories. Only in recent census surveys was this an option and in this six decade report and charts, we were not able to include them.
Sources: These statistics are calculated from weighted samples of U.S. Census data produced by the Minnesota Population Center's IPUMS USA: Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Ronald Goeken, Megan Schouweiler and Matthew Sobek. IPUMS USA: Version 12.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2022. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V12.0. The following samples: 1970 1% Metro FM1, 1990 5% State, 2000 1%, 2006-2010 ACS 5yr, 2016-2020 ACS 5yr.