The correlation between behaviors conducive of family formation and the behaviors correlated with home ownership.

An interesting and explicit argument.  From Marriage, Then Mortgage by Steven Malanga.  The subheading is Much of the racial gap in homeownership is tied to rates of family formation.  I am not sure I have ever focused on this aspect before.

The news has sparked new efforts by housing advocates and government regulators to revive and expand now-familiar programs to boost black homeownership, including special funds aimed at subsidizing down payments for low-income buyers, new financing for building affordable housing, and anti-gentrification programs to trim housing-price increases in minority markets. The campaigns have also included stepped-up efforts by regulators to stem what some advocates claim is the redlining of black neighborhoods by mortgage lenders.

Yet the gap between white and black homeownership was smaller in 1960, before the passage of antidiscrimination laws like the Fair Housing Act and the Community Reinvestment Act and before extensive efforts by regulators to intervene in housing markets to fight discrimination. Though housing advocates argue that housing somehow remains rife with “implicit,” or buried, racism, it’s hard to believe that obstacles to buying a home are greater today than during an era when Jim Crow laws were still on the books in some places and open discrimination in housing was common.

The countervailing argument—advanced for years by economist Thomas Sowell, the late UC–Berkeley professor John C. Ogbu, and the Manhattan Institute’s Jason Riley—is that differences in group behavior account for much of the divergence in economic outcomes for ethnic or racial groups. Sowell and Riley have argued that government interventions starting in the 1960s proved counterproductive to minority advancement, supplanting personal responsibility and individual initiative with the idea that state aid is what matters.

One issue that Sowell has focused on—the steep decline in marriage and family formation among blacks—seems especially relevant to the latest homeownership data. Though marriage rates have slowly declined in America, marriage as a factor in homeownership remains enormously significant. Among married couples, the overall homeownership rate is consistently around 80 percent. Married households are more likely to have two wage earners and consequently find it easier in general to get credit. Married couples are also more likely to follow what City Journal’s Kay Hymowitz describes as a life “script,” which includes an expectation that homeownership will follow marriage. That’s partially why homeownership among married couples is strong across all races, including African-Americans. For blacks, the married homeownership rate has hovered recently around 64 percent, not so far from the rates for other groups.

Interesting throughout.  The argument is, simplistically, that different cultures value marriage differently.  The behaviors necessary for a functioning marriage/family are behaviors that also make homeownership more achievable (self-control, self-discipline, future orientation, sacrifice, etc.)  

If a group has lower marriage rates you would expect them to have lower home ownership rates.  

I suspect that the argument is directionally correct.  It would be interesting to see data from other countries in order to remove the issue of race and discrimination.  I suspect some of this data may be in Charles Murray's Coming Apart which focused only on whites in order to avoiding the theoretical confounding issue of race.  

Adopt public policies which increase marriage and family formation is probably a correct idea but hard to achieve.  Ultimately it is an aggregation of individual choices.  We need to be a lot more explicit about the overall benefits of many of the old social norms which have been carelessly tossed to the side.