Immigrants and housing demand.

AuthorPainter, Gary D.
PositionEssay

It is well recognized that immigrants have settled in communities all across the country and that demographic change has important implications for all segments of society. Further, a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences (NAS 2015) finds that the pace of immigrant integration has accelerated. Researchers, including this author, have studied the factors driving immigrant housing demand for the past two decades. This research (Painter, Gabriel, and Myers 2001) was motivated in part by comparing gaps in native and immigrant housing outcomes, such as homeownership, to assess levels of immigrant integration into communities. My research shows that the higher rates of moves by immigrant households in the 1980s and 1990s accounted for a substantial part of the gap in homeownership rates between immigrants and native households. Further differences in housing outcomes included different rates of headship (Painter and Yu 2010), which is the tendency of a person to form a household, a higher propensity to live in overcrowded conditions (Painter and Yu 2008), and residence in higher cost metropolitan areas (Coulson 1999).

Real estate practitioners and policymakers throughout the country have often ignored immigrant housing demand and local community contributions of immigrants because until the new millennium, most immigrants lived in a limited number of metropolitan areas ("immigrant gateways") in a handful of states, such as California, Texas, New York, and Illinois. Even as immigrants began to move to other metropolitan areas in the South and Midwest ("emerging gateways") in sizeable numbers, practitioners often viewed these populations as more transient in nature, moving from job to job and never putting down roots in communities. This false assumption led professionals to ignore the influence of the growing number of immigrants in places like emerging gateways. However, the dawn of the new millennium has yielded a number of changes that requires a reassessment of the level and drivers of housing demand among immigrants as immigrant populations have grown substantially in all metropolitan areas across the United States.

Chief among these changes is how the permanence of the immigrant population has changed markedly over the last two decades. Contrary to pervasive stereotypes, the majority of immigrants in the United States are not new arrivals and have lived in the United States for a decade or longer. (1) Moreover, in the places where most immigrants reside (e.g., California, Texas, New York, and...

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