Home ownership continues to fall

Owning a home isn’t as popular, or as affordable, as it used to be.

The national homeownership rate fell 0.6 percent last year, to 64.5 percent, the 10th consecutive year that figure has declined, according to the 2015 State of the Nation’s Housing Report.

The report is published by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

That decline continued into the first quarter of this year with a 63.7 percent rate of ownership, meaning that was the percentage of families or individuals that owned the house in which they lived.

That was the lowest quarterly percentage since in more than 20 years, according to the report, which was released Wednesday.

Overall, there was a drop of about 233,000 homeowner households in the United States last year. Since 2006, when homeowner households peaked, that number has declined by about 1.7 million.

The decline in homeowner households is spread more or less evenly throughout the country and is not confined to any one area.

“While recent estimates suggest that homeownership rates may be [strengthening] in some areas, there is no evidence so far of a significant rebound,” the report stated.

“A large decline in homeowner households in any community is clearly cause for concern. Not only does it reflect the uprooting of a substantial share of existing residents, but the financial stresses that both produced and resulted from the foreclosure crisis further undermine neighborhood stability.”