Housing Fragility: Wealth Position, Portfolio Composition, and Education Among Homeowners

Homeownership is considered an important indicator of financial stability, but the economic security it provides varies substantially across households. In this paper, I examine housing fragility among U.S. homeowners and ask how vulnerability to housing- and credit-market disruptions is organized across wealth position, portfolio composition, and educational attainment. Drawing on perspectives emphasizing financialization and action under uncertainty, I conceptualize housing fragility as a multidimensional condition rooted in the organization of household balance sheets and in unequal capacities to navigate financial institutions and market risk. Using pooled cross-sectional data from the 1989–2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, I analyze six indicators capturing leverage, repayment strain, portfolio concentration, and housing cost burdens among homeowners. Findings show that housing fragility is systematically stratified across the wealth distribution, with lower-wealth homeowners consistently exhibiting higher leverage, greater repayment burdens, and more severe housing cost strain. Fragility is also more strongly associated with overall net worth than with housing values alone, indicating that broader balance-sheet resources shape households’ capacity to sustain ownership under changing market conditions. In addition, less-educated homeowners experience persistently higher levels of fragility, particularly in measures tied to repayment obligations and ongoing financial strain. The findings show that homeownership amplifies existing wealth inequalities by exposing lower-wealth households to disproportionate financial risk embedded in contemporary housing and credit markets.

Duke Scholars

Author Lisa A. Keister Sociology