CHICAGO — Ndidi A. Okakpu has been trying to buy her first home for three years.
First, the pandemic got in the way, causing her to put her search on hold. Then, in 2021 and 2022, emergency expenses cut into her savings. Volatility in the housing market, including high prices and a limited supply of homes for sale, has also posed a challenge.
“The supply went down really badly, and so all the wonderful spots you were looking for weren’t there anymore,” said Okakpu, who is the director of development for a Chicago-area nonprofit. “Then the few items that seemed okay were extremely expensive.”
Okakpu isn’t the only single woman finding it difficult to purchase a home.
After increasing for six years, the national homeownership rate for single women ages 25 to 35 declined to 24.5% in 2022, down from 28.6% in 2021, according to new data from Zillow. Homeownership among single men of the same age range increased by 2.7 percentage points to 33.1% in 2022.
Zillow attributes the gap in homeownership rates between single women and men to the lower salaries that women earn, which causes them to struggle to afford rising home prices. Record-low levels of homes for sale are also pushing up prices and making it difficult for all want-to-be buyers to afford homes.
“Single women had made great strides in narrowing the homeownership gap, but the pandemic reminded us that progress is not always linear,” said Skylar Olsen, chief economist at Zillow. “With rising and volatile mortgage rates furthering affordability challenges, the road to affordable homeownership remains an uphill battle, and it may take creative solutions or even doubling up in a home to achieve that dream.”
Because of their lower earnings, only 17.5% of the homes listed for sale in the Chicago area in February were considered affordable to single women ages 18 to 44. For single men, 23.4% of listed homes were affordable, according to Zillow, which defines “affordable” as a mortgage payment that takes up no more than 30% of an individual’s income.
U.S. census data from 2021 shows the median salary for Chicago women is $31,200, compared with a median salary for Chicago men of $35,000.
There were more affordable homes available several years ago. Zillow’s measures show that 35.5% of Chicago area homes were affordable to women in 2018, and 42.5% were affordable to men. But even though affordability has declined, the Chicago area is performing better than the country as a whole. Nationwide, 13.8% of homes were affordable to women in February, and 17.2% were affordable to men.
Jameelah Smith, real estate broker with @properties | Christie’s International Real Estate, said some of her clients, many of whom are single women, expect to be approved for mortgages that are larger than what they can realistically afford.
“For single women, there is only one income in the household,” Smith said. “And depending on what that job is and what debt they have, they can only be approved for so much.”
She is currently working with five single women, all of whom have an adult child or a parent co-signing with them so that they can afford more.
“Alone, they (can afford) $200,000. Once they add an older child (or parent), they are able to go up to $300,000,” Smith said, who has two clients under contact and three who are still looking.
When taking out the age factor, single women own more homes than single men nationally, but women, especially women of color, face more challenges in achieving homeownership due to historically being denied financial services, decades of racist housing policies, the gender pay gap and lower returns on their real estate investments, according to data compiled and analyzed by the Urban Institute.
JaQara Booker, 39, currently owns a two-flat in the Bridgeport neighborhood on Chicago's South Side but has been looking since the latter half of last year to move herself and her 5- and 10-year-old children into a single-family home and keep the two-flat as an investment property. She previously owned a single-family home with her ex-husband in the suburb Evergreen Park and moved to the two-flat in September 2020.
She said it has been difficult to find a house that checks off all her boxes: a safe neighborhood, good schools, modernized, spacious, the right price.
The marketing professional and entrepreneur is looking for a three-bedroom home between $475,000 and $485,000, mainly in the South Side neighborhoods Bronzeville and Hyde Park neighborhoods, as she is seeing new construction there that she said she wasn’t seeing back in 2020. But many of the homes are in the $700,000 range.
“The challenges exist to be the same: the desired neighborhood doesn’t really have anything available — the price point is too high or I would have to sacrifice … knowing I would have to put a lot of work into it,” said Booker, who believes renovations would be difficult with her young children.
In 2020 and 2021, mortgage rates were at historically low levels of between 2 and 3%, causing more Black and Latino households, many headed by women, to pursue homeownership, according to U.S. census data analyzed by the Urban Institute. But in 2022, mortgage rates climbed back up, said Jung Choi, senior research associate at the Urban Institute.
“Especially for women with children, because they also have greater financial expenses, it is even more difficult to save for a down payment, especially during the past couple of years with lack of housing supply, rent prices have also gone up,” Choi said.
Lynnette Cheatham, 46, is one example of a single woman who has been able to buy a home. She sold her Bronzeville condo in September 2021 for around $375,000 and began renting again while she looked for a single-family home, primarily searching in the Chicago suburbs.
The accountant began looking in January 2022, spending at least 10 weekends going to dozens of open houses, sometimes in one day, to find the right one.
“The frustration from this experience versus my others was getting outbid,” Cheatham said, who was looking for a home to buy for the fourth time. “I wasn’t used to this. … It was tough.”
Cheatham lost out on four homes before she landed her three-bedroom, $324,000 house in suburban Oak Lawn in August 2022 after a day of seeing around 20 properties. With a mortgage rate of 5% and homeowners insurance and property taxes included, Cheatham’s monthly payment comes out to $2,100.
She said she’s relieved and is happy to have a larger space to host her family when they come to visit from out of town.
Her advice to other single women looking to buy includes establishing a stable and high credit score, seeking down payment assistance, building emergency savings and walking away from deals that don’t feel right.
“It is a process, and it is not going to happen overnight,” Cheatham said. “Everyone has an idea of what it should be and that idea may not be reality. I have always had this thing: Every time I walked in, if I didn’t have a feeling, then it wasn’t the house for me.”
Okakpu, who preferred not to share her exact age but falls into the age range some of the Zillow data applies to, is determined to find a place this year.
She said she qualifies for up to $350,000 and ideally wants a single-family home or townhome in Hyde Park or Bronzeville where many of her friends live. Prices are currently too high there, she said, and she also has to consider her elderly father and brother who has special needs.
“I have given myself less than a year to, hell or high water, get her done and land on something,” Okakpu said.
