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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

August 2011 – Market Report

According to the June 2011 statistics from the Regional Multiple Listing Service (RMLS), the median sold price of homes sold in July 2011 climbed 2.20% as compared to June 2011. July’s increase in the median sold price is the fifth consecutive monthly increase. It is also the highest the median sold price has been since December 2010, when it was $230,000.

Pendings and Solds Both Up Year Over Year

The number of homes with an accepted offer remained steady in July 2011 as compared to June 2011 but jumped more than 33% as compared to a year ago.

Home sales slid in July 2011 as compared to June 2011 but showed a healthy increase of more than 13% as compared to July 2010.

Inventory continues to fall

In July 2011, the months supply of inventory under contract reached its lowest level since April 2010, when it was 5.8 months. Actual number of homes for sale on the last day of the month of July 2011 was the lowest in more than two years.

The Fed

The Federal Reserve painted a much gloomier picture of the economy Tuesday, and indicated it would keep cash cheap and easy for at least two more years.

Following its fifth policymaking meeting of the year, the central bank also surprised Wall Street with several dramatic changes to its official statement.

Among those surprises were dissension among the ranks of the central bank, a “considerably slower” reading on the economy, and a bold statement that the Fed stands ready to enact further stimulus measures if needed.

Interest rates: The Fed indicated it plans to keep “exceptionally low” interest rates in place until at least mid-2013 as a way to continue to prop up the recovery.

The federal funds rate is the central bank’s key tool to spur the economy and a low rate is thought to encourage spending by making it cheaper to borrow money.

The Fed has kept the rate near zero since 2008, but has long been ambiguous on its future timeframe, saying it would keep the federal funds rate near zero for an “extended period.”

The new two-year time horizon was an unusual move because the Fed doesn’t typically signal its policies that far in advance, and because it was interpreted as an admission that the economy will remain weak until then.

“It surprised me that they boxed themselves into a corner that way,” said Professor Steve Wyatt from the Farmer School of Business at Miami University. “It essentially tells markets that they don’t see any hope that we will see a stronger economic recovery in the next two years.”

Dow soars 429 points in wild session

Disagreement within the Fed: Also surprising, was that three of the Fed’s 10 voting members formally dissented against using the new language. Multiple dissenting votes are rare among the Fed’s policy-making committee.

Regional Fed presidents Richard Fisher of Dallas, Narayana Kocherlakota of Minneapolis and Charles Plosser of Philadelphia said they would have preferred to keep the “extended period” phrase instead of laying out the 2013 timeframe.

“What it’s telling us is, this was a very divisive meeting and there was a lot of back and forth,” said Sherry Cooper, chief economist with BMO Financial Group and a former Fed economist.

Aside from some other gloomier language about the U.S. recovery, the Federal Reserve did little else in response to heightened fears about a global economic slowdown.

“This was a very conservative statement,” Cooper said. “Basically, they did the least they could do, short of doing absolutely nothing.”

America’s job crisis

Gloomy outlook: The central bank acknowledged that economic growth in the United States is “considerably slower” than expected. That marks a change from prior statements, when the Fed had said the recovery was chugging along at a “moderate pace.”

“Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that economic growth so far this year has been considerably slower than the Committee had expected,” the official Fed statement said.

The Fed also acknowledged that thejob market has recently deteriorated, consumer spending has flattened out and the housing sector remains depressed.

More stimulus ahead? Critics have pointed out that there’s little the Fed can do to tame volatile financial markets after Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit rating Friday. Having exhausted most of its traditional tools, the Fed also has few remaining options to try to prop up the sluggish economy and job market, many say.

But the Fed indicated it is considering a “range of policy tools available to promote a stronger economic recovery,” and “is prepared to employ these tools as appropriate.” This language was much stronger than in June, when the Fed seemed to take a more passive stance, saying it would “monitor the economic outlook” and “act as needed.”