Johnson & Johnson will break itself into two companies.
Single mothers — those who have never married — have made up a growing share of home buyers over the past three decades. But the pandemic threatens to dampen that progress, experts said.
Women have borne the brunt of the job losses over the last year and a half, while also shouldering most of the child-care responsibilities, Tara Siegel Bernard reports for The New York Times. At the same time, the housing market has grown highly competitive: Prices of single-family homes rose nearly 20 percent in August, the latest data available, from a year earlier, according to SP CoreLogic Case-Shiller’s National Home Price Index.
The pandemic, combined with the challenging market landscape, has eroded women’s confidence about their likelihood of becoming homeowners: Nearly 60 percent of single female heads of households who rent — those who never married, those who are separated or divorced, and widows — said they could not afford to buy and didn’t know if they ever would, according to a September study by Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giant.
Single women accounted for 19 percent of home buyers from July 2020 through June 2021, up from 18 percent in the preceding year, according to an analysis from the National Association of Realtors released on Thursday. The slight increase is above prepandemic rates, but may partly be a result of the decline in the number of Americans getting married, said Jessica Lautz, vice president of demographics and behavioral insights at the Realtors group.
“Women have a lot of headwinds right now,” she said. “We know they are buying on a lower income even as prices have increased and inventory has decreased.”
Single women buying their first home, for example, had a median household income of $58,300 in 2020, compared with $69,300 for their male counterparts, the association found. Single women tend to be older when they buy, and spend less on their homes: The median age of first-time single female buyers was 34, compared with 31 for men, and women spent about 14 percent less.
Homeownership is often viewed as a sign of financial stability, with good reason. READ THE ARTICLE →
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/11/12/business/news-business-stock-market