This Is the City Where the Most People Own Their Homes

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 27, 7:35AM EDT

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This Is the City Where the Most People Own Their Homes — © peeterv / iStock via Getty Images

Recently, owning a home has become more difficult for many people. Three years ago, a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage had a rate as low as 3%. That figure is nearly 7% now. People may pay hundreds, if not thousands, more in monthly payments than they did three years ago. Because of those costs, many people have chosen to rent instead of buy.

Online lending marketplace Lending Tree says the overall percentage of home ownership in America’s top 50 metros was 61.72% in 2022. The number has risen throughout the pandemic. The figures show that, based on “analysis of the latest U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data, the share of owner-occupied homes in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas increased by 93 basis points from 2019 to 2022 and 108 basis points from 2012 to 2022.”

The U.S. metro with the highest home ownership rate is also among the poorest and has a high poverty rate. The ownership rate is more than 71% in Detroit, based on 1.7 million occupied units. The metro also has a low median home value of $245,500.

Among the top 10 metros in terms of home ownership, many are poor and have low median home values. These include Pittsburgh, with a median home value of $209,800, and St. Louis, at $237,700. (See which states have the highest property taxes.)

At the far end of the spectrum, the metros with the lowest home ownership percentage are Los Angeles (median home value of $847,700), San Francisco ($1,135,500), and San Jose ($1,422,600). The ownership percentage in each of these cities was below 57%.

These 10 cities have the highest percentage of home ownership:

City	Housing Units	Homes Owned
Detroit	1,762,104	71.49%
Minneapolis	1,483,453	70.54%
Pittsburgh	1,021,314	70.45%
St. Louis	1,168,546	69.67%
Birmingham	443,821	69.46%
Louisville	535,884	69.18%
Cincinnati	916,246	69.10%
Raleigh	559,173	67.80%
Salt Lake City	448,172	67.65%
Richmond	538,478	67.63%

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.