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Recent immigrants dominated Oregon’s Latino population 10 years ago.

“They were newcomers, they were younger, and they were renters,” Myers said. Fast-forward a decade, he said, and you find a community that is more established, more educated and more financially stable.

As more Latinos became ready to buy, organizations sprouted to make owning a reality. Javier Alomia joined Portland’s fledgling Latino Home Initiative, aimed at moving Latinos from renters to buyers through education and down-payment assistance, in 2005 shortly after becoming a real estate agent.

“I saw that there was a need in the Hispanic community for homeownership to be done the right way,” said Alomia, who emigrated from Ecuador 10 years ago and bought his first home in Northeast Portland in 2006. “When I started in the industry, I saw there was a lot of abuse from unscrupulous lenders.”

“Families pull together”

Today, about half of Alomia’s clients are Latino, and about half of those are second-generation Americans. He said efforts to assist Latinos contributed to the increase in homeownership, but culture also played a role.

That’s how Adan Lucatero’s family became homeowners. Lucatero, 32, came to the United States from Mexico 27 years ago, landing in Oregon after his mom found work in nurseries.

The family of nine rented until his mother helped his brother buy a home a few years ago. One of Lucatero’s sisters later bought the house. And this year, she helped Lucatero become a homeowner himself.

Lucatero, who works at a Hillsboro company that makes ceramic vases and cups, said buying his Beaverton condo took three years of saving and cleaning up his credit. To him, getting the key was the final step in becoming American.

“When I first came here, I wanted something to be proud of, that you worked hard to get,” he said. “It was a family effort.”

Patricia Tardiff, 54, bought her Hillsboro home in April with a $3,000 down payment, and shares expenses with her grown daughter.

“My dream came true, and I was able to buy a place for me and my daughter,” said Tardiff, a school secretary who emigrated from Colombia 12 years ago.

It’s a common story, Myers said. “You see them pooling incomes together, and so they tend to have a lot of income when buying,” he said.

That and youth — more than half of Latino owners are 44 or younger, compared with a quarter statewide — may have buffered Latinos against the worst of the housing crisis in Oregon. Many had less home equity to tap and avoided the kind of loans that spiraled into foreclosure for others. More earners meant the family could still make the mortgage if one lost a job. And, Myers said, many Latinos were inaccessible to predatory lenders, who in Oregon tended to speak only English.

“We saw it coming”

Homeownership for black Oregonians looks very different.

Nationwide, African Americans saw their ownership rates hit a record 50 percent in 2006 and then fall back to 45 percent in 2010, according to census data. In Oregon, the tumble to 32.9 percent made African Americans the least likely racial or ethnic group to own their homes. In Portland, black homeownership rates are the lowest in at least 20 years.

Decline in black homeownership Doris and Joe Hawkins are losing the house Doris bought in 1964 after they took out home equity loans that they can no longer afford. The couple are part of a major decline in black homeownership rates across Oregon. Watch video

“We saw it coming,” said Cheryl Roberts, executive director of the African American Alliance for Homeownership in Portland, “because of the economic breakdown that we’ve had, and the subprime lending that targeted us the most.”

Unlike Latino homeowners, more than 70 percent of African American homeowners in Oregon are 45 and older. Myers said many Africans Americans bought homes shortly after state and federal laws began outlawing housing discrimination.

“The older generation was denied the right to buy homes, and once they got the right, they went crazy and bought homes as fast as they could,” Myers said. African Americans saw another wave of homebuying early in the past decade, with a federal push to bring homeownership to underserved communities.

But by the end of the decade, many of the gains had been swept away.

In 2008, the Oregon Center for Public Policy released a study showing that black and Latino borrowers in Oregon were twice as likely to get a subprime loan as whites of the same income level. Several states and cities have sued lenders such as Wells Fargo and now-defunct Countrywide for discriminating against black and Latino borrowers by charging higher interest rates.

Many will lose homes

But in some ways, African Americans were especially vulnerable, with the nation’s highest unemployment rates and often only one earner in the household.

The Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, N.C., calculates that about 11 percent of black homeowners are in some stage of foreclosure and that 1.1 million black families will lose their homes by 2012.

Portland in 2004 also set a goal to close the homeownership gap between white residents and people of color by 2015.

Since then, the gap between whites and Asians has closed, and the Latino gap has narrowed. But the outlook for African Americans — with jobless rates in Oregon of 12.8 percent in 2010, compared with 11.0 percent overall– is dire.

“Many fear the whole process of buying and being discriminated against, and they worry that they’ll lose their jobs,” said Felicia Tripp Folsom, deputy director of the Portland Housing Center, a nonprofit that helps low- and moderate-income residents of all races become homeowners. “They are afraid to buy.”

She finds the trends highlighted by the census both heartening and troubling.

“I think it’s great that Latinos are able to buy at levels they are, but my concern is why African Americans are seeing the decline,” Tripp Folsom said. “Whether people want to admit it or not, something is wrong.”

– Nikole Hannah-Jones