housing
Owner-occupied homes
Why this matters
Owning your home is one of the main ways families build wealth. This measure shows the share of lived-in homes that are occupied by their owners, rather than rented. A higher rate often points to neighborhood stability, since owners tend to stay longer and have a financial stake in the community.
Homeownership also lets families build equity over time, money they can pass on or borrow against. But access to ownership has not been equal, and large, long-standing gaps remain between racial and ethnic groups. In Charlotte, narrowing that gap is an explicit goal: the city’s Housing Trust Fund — expanded by voter-approved bonds ($50M in 2020 and 2022, $100M in 2024) — and the privately financed Housing Opportunity Investment Fund are the main local tools aimed at expanding access to stable, affordable housing.
A low owner-occupied share is not automatically a problem; lively neighborhoods can have many renters. Read this number alongside cost and rent figures to get the full picture of who can afford to put down roots.
About the Charlotte region
This explorer covers the 14-county, two-state Charlotte region (11 North Carolina and 3 South Carolina counties). Many of these indicators connect to a defining regional story: a landmark Harvard study ranked Charlotte last, 50th of the 50 largest U.S. metros for economic mobility (a child raised in the poorest fifth had about a 4.4% chance of reaching the top fifth), a finding that launched the region's Leading on Opportunity agenda. Updated 2024 data show Charlotte has since climbed to 38th.
Opportunity here is also unevenly mapped. An affluent “wedge” fanning southeast from uptown holds a large majority of the city's wealth on under a quarter of its land, while a ”crescent” to the north, west, and east carries higher poverty, a legacy of redlining, exclusionary zoning, and highway routing that recurs across the race, income, health, tree-canopy, and school maps in this tool. No single indicator is good or bad on its own; together they describe how the region sorted opportunity.
Companion resources: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer · UNC Charlotte Urban Institute · Opportunity Atlas · Methods & sources
Learn more
- U.S. Census Bureau — Why We Ask: Ownership census.gov
How home ownership (tenure) is measured and why the data matter.
- U.S. Census Bureau — Housing Vacancies and Homeownership census.gov
Official source for U.S. homeownership and vacancy rate trends.
- Urban Institute — Reducing the Racial Homeownership Gap urban.org
Research on how ownership builds wealth and why gaps persist.
About the data
Calculated from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates (2014–2024), at the Census-tract level, with margins of error. ACS 5-year vintages overlap year to year, so the series is a rolling estimate; compare only non-overlapping periods.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.