Who would ever think that a small town in Texas would be a great place to retire for a Black man? Ask David Michael Jones. The retired military man just bought a spacious home in Killeen. The 2,800 square foot home makes Moore feel like he’s “on top of the world,” reports CNN. Jones says he was able to buy the home because of his long career with the military. The 68-year-old retired with a full pension and disability benefits, and also received special financing through the Veterans Administration. And as a disabled veteran in Texas, he does not have to pay property taxes. Fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which banned lending discrimination on the basis of race, the Black homeownership rate in the US is back down to where it was in the 1960s. That’s mostly because of a precipitous decline that began in 2000, as African Americans were disproportionately hard-hit by predatory lending and the foreclosure crisis that followed. In 2015, only 41.2 percent of Black households owned their homes, compared to 71.2 percent of white households. That disparity explains much of America’s staggering wealth inequality, with the median white family owning 10 times the assets of the median Black family. But Killeen, a city of about 140,0000 people located an hour’s drive north of Austin, is different. According to analysis by the Urban Institute, a non-partisan think tank, Killeen has the lowest racial homeownership gap in the country. In this metropolitan area, the white homeownership rate is only 14.5 percentage points above the rate for the city’s Black households, which stands at 48.5 percent. The reason: Fort Hood, one of the largest military installations in the United States, serves as a powerful on-ramp for opportunity for historically disadvantaged populations. (The city with the next smallest racial homeownership gap is in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is home to the mammoth Fort Bragg.) Although Fort Hood says it does not track the racial composition of its active duty population of about 37,500 people and 46,500 family members, African Americans are over-represented in the armed forces generally, and 40 percent of Killeen’s overall population is Black. Most soldiers live outside Fort Hood’s walls, in private housing. On top of their base pay, soldiers receive a housing allowance, which can go toward either renting or buying a home. With a VA certificate, they can purchase a home with no down payment and a lower-than-market interest rate. And in the Killeen metropolitan area, where the median home price is only about 68 percent of the national median, even the lowest-ranking soldier can afford to buy.
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