After the housing crisis of the late 2000s, the homeownership rate in the United States declined to 62.9% in 2016 and then slowly inched up. But, it jumped quite a bit from 2019 to 2020:

During 2020, the homeownership rate jumped to roughly 67%, up nearly 3% from a year earlier after remaining largely flat for a decade, according to the Census Bureau.

The article attributes this jump to COVID-19 and the shift of people from cities to suburbs.

This may be true. I have chronicled this here on this blog. However, there is limited overall data compared to reports from various cities (like New York and San Francisco) or population figures for states and communities.

If indeed homeownership jumped nearly three percentage points in one year, this is a big shift. In the historical data table from the Census (Table 14), it is rare to find huge jumps year to year. The fallout from the late 2000s happened in relatively small decreases.

A big jump in 2020 has implications for multiple actors: communities with new residents and others losing residents; those involved in the housing industry from develoeprs to realtors to investors to landlords; residents as those with resources took advantage of purchasing opportunities while others struggled to hold on and payments are looming.

How will these dueling pressures – buying homes amid COVID-19 and low mortgage rates at the same time as economic uncertainty – play out?