Federal oversight may be hindering Native American homeownership, GAO report finds

Around 56% of Native American households own their homes, according to Harvard’s Center on Housing Studies. That’s 15 percentage points less than white households — a gap that widens to 30% in states with high Native American populations.  

Now, a new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that federal oversight isn’t helping.  

Most tribal land isn’t owned outright by individuals; it’s held in trust by the federal government. Real estate transactions involving that trust land — so, most that happen in Indian country — have to be approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  

“This process was designed to protect the ownership interests of tribes and tribal citizens,” said Anna Maria Ortiz with the Government Accountability Office.

But it sometimes gets in the way of Native homeownership, she said, when the BIA misses its own deadlines to approve mortgages or doesn’t communicate with tribal leaders about the status of applications.  

“Those delays work to the disadvantage of the tribes and the homeowners,” said Nancy Pindus, who looks at housing needs in Indian Country for the Urban Institute.  

In recent years, she said that delays could have exposed Native homeowners to interest rates and construction costs that just keep rising.  

And “because it’s a long and cumbersome process, it has discouraged many lenders from being active on tribal lands,” she added.

That adds yet another potential barrier to Native homeownership.