The rate of black homeownership fell to 42.2 percent in the first quarter of 2017, while the rate of white homeownership rose to 71.9 percent, the widest gap in America since World War II, according to a report published last month by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Between 1994 and 2017, the black-white homeownership gap increased by 2.3 percentage points, while "at the same time, the homeownership rates were up nearly 5 percentage points among Asians (to 55.5 percent) and Hispanics (to 46.0 percent), narrowing the gap with white homeownership rates by 2.8 percentage points."