Single women in SLO outpace men when it comes to buying homes, report says
The city of San Luis Obispo has one of the largest gender homeownership gaps in the United States, according to a new report by Porch, a home-buying advice group.
Single women in SLO own homes at a rate of 55.17%, compared to a single male homeownership rate of 40.01%, the report said.
That female homeownership advantage of 15.16% is good for the fourth-highest gap of its kind in the United States, behind other small metros Odessa, Texas (17.35%), Yakima, Washington (17.49%) and Midland, Texas (19.56%).
This follows a half-century-long trend in housing, during which single women have historically been more likely to own a home than single men.
“The percentage of single female homeowners has exceeded the share of single male homeowners dating back at least 45 years,” the report said. “More than half of single women have been homeowners in all but five years since 1976, while the homeownership rate for single men has never topped 50% in that time.”
Despite making around $0.84 for every dollar a man makes, the median self-reported home value for single female households is the same as single male households at $175,000, the report said.
However, the ownership gap appears to be shrinking. The overall homeownership rate for single women was more than 15% higher than the rate for single men in the late 1970s, but that gap is 6.5% today.
SLO’s position on the list follows a national trend in which cities in the South and Southwest United States have the largest gender homeownership gaps.
Those areas “make up the bulk of the locations with the largest gender homeownership gap,” the report said. “California also places three cities in the top 15 largest gaps, including the nation-leading San Jose area, where the gap between male and female homeownership is nearly 11 percentage points.”
Several California cities cracked the top 15 largest metros with the largest gender homeownership gap, with the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area topping the list of female homeownership gaps at 10.99%.
Other California metro areas like San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley ranked fifth with a 9.93% gap, while the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro area ranked 12th with a 7.99% gender gap.
This story was originally published August 6, 2022 at 12:00 PM.
