Why Women Build Matters
Women Build is more than hammering nails and having fun on our Habitat Chicago build sites. Each year, we raise money to make homeownership a reality for women purchasing homes in our Affordable Homeownership Program and call attention to the many hurdles women have had to achieve homeownership.
Stable, quality, and affordable homeownership brings so many benefits to one's life, including:
- Financial - Owning a home is one of the biggest wealth-building tools. In fact, homeowners have a net worth about 40 times higher than renters.1
- Health - Compared with renters, homeowners generally had lower prevalence of chronic health conditions, especially among those aged 45 to 64 years.2
- Educational - Frequent residence changes resulting from housing instability often result in frequent school changes that can make students less likely to complete high school on time and more likely to complete fewer years of school.3
These benefits (and many more) were legally not available to single women without a co-signer until 1974.
Single women have had countless disadvantages in the homeownership process along with missing out on 50+ years of financial, educational, and social opportunities:
- Unequal pay and uneven care responsibilities - Women spend twice as much time as men, on average, on childcare and household work. All groups experience a free-time gender gap, with women having 13% less free time than men, on average.4
- Higher mortgage denials and mortgage rates, despite superior payment performance - As a result of earning less than single men, single women borrowers have higher mortgage debt relative to income (3.3x a single woman's income vs 3.2 a single man's income).5
- It's even harder for Black women - While White women are paid 83.1% of White men's median wages, Black women are paid only 69.8%.6 Not to mention the many racist housing practices like redlining, predatory lending, racial covenants, and other government programs that barred Black Americans from the homeownership for decades.
Despite all of these hurdles, single women are outpacing single men when it comes to homeownership - As of 2023, single women own 11.14 million homes, while single men own 8.42 million. In percentages, single women own 13.01% of owner-occupied homes, while single men own 9.83%.7
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