New Orleans   Something big is happening in housing. Maybe big and bad. Maybe big and unknown, but scary in its uncertainty for the future.

Here are the facts that frighten.

Home ownership dropped again in the last quarter of 2016 and when it did so, it fell below 63% to the lowest level in 50 years.

Mortgage loans to African-American families fell in the review period between 2004 and 2014 from 7% of total mortgages for blacks to only 5% of mortgages issued. Hispanic families budged up slightly from 7 to 8%, Asian families stayed at 5%, and mortgages to white families zoomed up from 58% to 69%.

This analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data was done by the National Association of Real Estate Brokers. They argue in their report that this drop has to do with a tightening of credit standards after the 2007 housing meltdown. Couple that information with another recent statistic that prices in the housing market now are only 2% lower than their historic highs achieved in 2006 before the bubble burst. For the real estate brokers, it is in their interest to have their cake and eat it, too. A return of high prices means happy days for them. Claiming the decrease in much of minority-based lending is based on a change of standards, rather than a clearer manifestation of discrimination is also squarely in their interest.

The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the reasons that minorities are getting a smaller share of loans is the return of the jumbo mortgages to “more affluent borrowers with loans exceeding $417,000.” Mumbo-jumbo. Report after report also indicates with this surge in pricing what used to be “jumbo,” is now just standard operating procedure. Average housing prices have now hit $1 million San Jose for example. Meanwhile other reports speak to housing and income growth in center cities around the country, including in areas like Detroit and Philadelphia and deterioration of income and housing prices and values in working class areas of cities, along with the paradox of millennials wanting to live downtown which is pushing the prices up now, while Pew Research surveys are also saying they are only committed to living downtown for five or ten years. What then?

Anyway we shake-and-bake these figures, it is hard to maintain a belief that that part of the American Dream that included home ownership is still alive. We can’t have both stagnant incomes and rising home prices with narrower lending parameters and believe that home ownership can increase among low-and-moderate income families. The conservative blame-game that tried to saddle the housing collapse not on Wall Street recklessness but on lax lending standards has mutated into a form of de facto national housing policy.

Does that mean there will be more affordability in the rental market? There’s no indication of any new trend there, and in fact market-rate construction for the millennials is still the driver. Meanwhile neither political candidate has a program around housing, much less affordable housing, and if values are falling in low-and-moderate income communities that are not on the gentrification list, that also means that citizen wealth will continue to drop like a rock.

Housing is now on the trajectory from problem to issue to crisis, and the silence around solutions is depressing and deafening.

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Please enjoy East Coast Girl by Butch Walker. Thanks to KABF.