My Oregon Homeowner Assistance Fund Estimate: Presumptively Socially Disadvantaged Owner Occupants Were 13.4% of All Owner Occupants in 2019

Oregon is slated to receive $90M+ to help homeowners from the American Rescue Plan Home Owner Assistance Fund (HAF).

My read is that Treasury guidance on the HAF is that it requires that funds spent on households above 100% of the household adjusted income limit be prioritized for "socially disadvantaged" homeowners.

That Treasury guidance further provides that African-American, Asian, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, American Indians and Alaska Natives, and Hispanics are all "presumptively" socially disadvantaged. 

In the absence of any current Treasury guidance on how to count presumptively socially disadvantaged homeowners  I thought it might be useful to look at existing data sources and provide some estimates for Oregon. 

The PDF file HERE and embedded below provides my counts of these presumptively socially disadvantaged homeowners along with their share of all homeowners and my rankings by both shares and counts of socially disadvantaged homeowners. 

Data is presented at the state wide level, at the three Portland Metro county level, and at the individual county level.

(TIP: You may need to scroll to the right to see all the columns in the PDF within your browser; downloading the file to your computer and opening in a PDF reader may allow better viewing of the full document).

My calculations: 

• Statewide 13.4% of owner occupants were presumptively socially disadvantaged owner occupants.
• In the combination of the three Portland Metro counties there was a higher percentage (17.2%) of presumptively socially disadvantaged owner occupants.
• In the rest of the state counties, there was a lower percentage (10.6%) of presumptively socially disadvantaged owner occupants.
• Morrow county had the highest percentage of socially disadvantaged owner occupants, while Baker had the lowest at 3.5%

Potential Uses:

IF counts of seriously delinquent loans are available at the state, county, or census tract levels are available multiplication by the presumptively socially disadvantaged homeowner rates will produce a count of those homeowners that may be helpful for outreach, servicer contacts, and fund allocations. 

[Note that I have previously produced counts of a subset of FHA seriously delinquent loans at the census tract level., using FHA published counts of those census tracts with 11 or more seriously delinquent loans].

These counts provide a baseline target for goal setting. 

• If funds are made available to owner occupants above 100% of median income it's reasonable to expect that the share of recipients in these groups reach these percentages.  
• And, for recipients below 100% of median income, these percentages should be the bare minimum since owner occupants in these presumptively socially disadvantaged groups are likely to have incomes below white owner occupants. 

Data Source and My Methodology: 

I used 2019 ACS 5 year table S2502. I used the five year ACS data because that data is available all the way to the census tract level. 

The link HERE should provide a download of 2019 5 Year ACS Table S2502 data for the state of Oregon, Oregon counties, and Oregon census tracts. Note that margins of error increase at smaller geographic levels.  

To arrive at the total count of socially disadvantaged owner occupants I added the estimates of all owner occupants who were 

1. Black, 
2. Asian, 
3. Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders
4. American Indian and Alaska Natives, 
5. Some other races
6. Two races
7. White Hispanics. [I derived that count by subtracting the count of White Not Hispanics from the White one race count] I included the resulting white Hispanic count because Hispanics are already included in the other race categories and including the full count of Hispanic owner occupants would result in double counting. 

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.