Exploring Racial and Ethnic Differences in US Home Ownership with Bayesian Beta-Binomial Regression

Racial and ethnic representation in home ownership rates is an important public policy topic for addressing inequality within society. Although more than half of the households in the US are owned, rather than rented, the representation of home ownership is unequal among different racial and ethnic groups. Here we analyze the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data to conduct an exploratory and statistical analysis of home ownership in the US, and find sociodemographic factors that are associated with differences in home ownership rates. We use binomial and beta-binomial generalized linear models (GLMs) with 2020 county-level data to model the home ownership rate, and fit the beta-binomial models with Bayesian estimation. We determine that race/ethnic group, geographic region, and income all have significant associations with the home ownership rate. To make the data and results accessible to the public, we develop an Shiny web application in R with exploratory plots and model predictions.