Word: homeownership
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...Homeownership has long been heralded as better for children. Kids raised in owned - as opposed to rented - homes show higher math and reading scores and less tendency to drop out of high school. In recent years, organizations from the National Association of Realtors to the President's Council of Economic Advisers to Habitat for Humanity have made sure to mention those sorts of findings in efforts to push more people to own houses...
...maybe the argument is flawed. New research by David Barker of the University of Iowa and Eric Miller of the Congressional Budget Office indicates that homeownership actually has little to no effect on how kids do in school. Their paper, "Homeownership and Child Welfare," which appears in the summer issue of Real Estate Economics, is drumming up interest in housing-policy circles for calling into question one of the basic rationales for encouraging people to own homes. It's yet another idea - like house prices always go up, and down payments aren't that important - being re-evaluated...
...more likely to signify a good event has taken place (a new job in a new town, say), whereas moving into a rented home is more likely to signify a bad turn (parents getting divorced, perhaps). Those other events are then influencing performance in school, the thinking goes, not homeownership or renting per se. (See pictures of Americans in their homes...
...course of the research, Barker and Miller tested additional variables to see if they could find other things affecting educational outcomes. One variable that influenced test scores even more than homeownership: whether a family owned a car. What to make of that? Well, maybe cars are important. Or, maybe neither cars nor houses are important in and of themselves, but both are good at signaling a lack of financial strain. "If parents have income coming in, then they are more likely to be able to afford a house or a car, and that's a more regular, less stressful environment...
...been there so long," says Andre Williams, a Harvard-educated real estate attorney and Miami Gardens city councilman, pointing at one of the houses and shaking his head at the state of the solid middle-class, African-American community he grew up in. "We had a 70% homeownership rate in this city. We took a lot of pride in that...