i don't understand how the homeownership rate isn't high with the homes are so cheap
SWATS
I think because middle class incomes haven't risen there since the Great Recession. I routinely see jobs paying way more money in Raleigh or Atlanta than in Charlotte. And if you get a high paying job there you better keep it. Very little churn in the job market keeps wages low.
Why It’s So Hard to Get Ahead in the South
CHARLOTTE—Shamelle Jackson moved here from Philadelphia, hoping to find work opportunities and better schools for her four children, who range in age from two to 14. Instead, she found a city with expensive housing, few good jobs, and schools that can vary dramatically in quality. “I’ve never struggled as hard as I do here in Charlotte,” Jackson, 34, told me.
Charlotte ranked dead last in an analysis of economic mobility in America’s 50 largest cities by the
Equality of Opportunity Project, a team of researchers out of Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. Children born into the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution in Charlotte had just a 4.4 percent chance of making it to the top 20 percent of the income distribution. That’s compared to a 12.9 percent chance for children in San Jose, California, and 10.8 percent change for children in Salt Lake City. These statistics are troubling because mobility is essentially just a formal term for the American Dream—the ability to find a good job, provide for children, and do better than one’s parents did. Rather than making it into the middle class in Charlotte, poor children, who are majority black and Latino, are very likely to stay poor.
The rich are segregating themselves off from everyone else
The disparity shows how rising income inequality has fed higher wealth inequality, as high-income Americans earn still higher amounts of money, which they can then use to bid on homes. That, in turn, allows them to earn even higher returns than housing does for everyone else.
Indeed, research released this year suggests that the primary driver of higher housing prices in well-off neighborhoods is not bigger homes or renovations but simply people bidding against one another to live in those areas.