Who Owns the Most Homes?

A recent report from Construction Coverage highlighted the top areas in the United States where most homeowners owning their homes outright reside.

According to the report, which highlighted the top 15 metro areas, the American with the most paid off their homes was the southern city of New Orleans.

With 32.5% of New Orleans residents owning their homes outright, frontrunner New Orleans was closely followed by Detroit, where the percentage of owner-occupied homes that were paid off came in at 30.6%.

The remainder of the top 15 metro areas included (in descending order from 3rd to 15th) were  Memphis (25.4%); Tucson, Arizona (26.1%); Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (26.2%); Cleveland, Ohio (26.5%); Rochester, New York (26.8%); Oklahoma City (28.2%); Tampa Bay (28.2%); Buffalo, New York (28.8%); Pittsburgh (28.9%); Birmingham-Hoover, Alabama (29.0%); Miami (29.6%); San Antonio (30.1%); and Houston (30.5%).

As many homeowners are continuing to struggle financially, recent studies show that some areas appear to be having a much harder time of it than others. Analysis from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample (ACS PUMS) and used this information to determine which of the nation’s metros had the most residents with completely paid off homes.

The measuring stick of ranking the metro areas was based on which had the highest share of owner-occupied homes that were completely paid off. Also among the factors studied and highlighted at this same time by the experts included calculating statistics such as median home value, median household income, median monthly housing costs, and housing costs as a percentage of income for households both with and without a mortgage of each metro area. Also noteworthy is the fact that the analysis consisted of only those households with homeowners under age 65 and metro areas with 100,000 residents or more.