By Ronald J. Hansen and Catherine Reagor | The Republic | azcentral.com
The Phoenix area, Maricopa County and Arizona posted the biggest estimated declines in U.S. homeownership rates in their categories in recent years, confirming that metro Phoenix was in important ways the national epicenter of the housing crash.
Newly released Census Bureau data shows the metro area, the county and the state swung from slightly above-average homeownership from 2007-09 to slightly below-average rates in the 2010-12 period.
The figures for metro Phoenix were the starkest: Homeownership dropped to 62.9 percent in the 2010-12 period from 67.3 percent in 2007-09, records show. The 4.4 percentage-point decline was the largest reversal of fortunes among the nation’s 50 largest metro areas. Las Vegas was a distant second.
