It is supremely farcical to call somebody with an enormous mortgage to home value a home owner. The percent is people who own their own homes in all races is miniscule.
True, but even all those people with large mortgages that they have yet to pay off tend to have different mentalities than renters, and I'd appreciate discussion as to why this is.
I had to write a paper in college about this for an urban planning class. Basically, the economic incentives for owners and renters differ because homeowners capture a larger portion of the returns to their investment in their residence than renters do. That investment can be spending actual money to do things like keep your house nicely painted and landscaped, or it can be "social capital" in the sense of getting to know and having good relations with your neighbors and investing in semi-public goods like a neighborhood Little League team or a book club or a local church.
Homeowners ostensibly want their home to go up in value, so they're willing to invest economic capital that will do that. If you borrowed $200K to buy a $250K house, you'd ideally like the value of the house to increase at least by more than the interest rate on the mortgage. (If the house is still worth $250K ten years later, you lost money because taking the interest into account, you paid more than $250K for something that is still worth $250K. If it's worth $350K, you're delighted.) But they also probably intend to live there for at least a few years, so they're willing to invest in social capital as well because it will make their time there more enjoyable. (You could also get into income effects and the work-leisure trade off. Someone who works two jobs logistically can't make the same social capital investment as a stay-at-home mother.)
Renters for the most part don't care about anything other than how much their paying in rent and what they're getting for it. Their landlord could opt not to renew their lease at any time, so they don't really know how long they'll be staying there. They don't benefit from their house/apartment's appraised value going up (in fact, if it does go up, that will likely either mean their rent gets raised or they get their lease terminated so the owner can sell it).
