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Title: Caught in the housing bubble: Immigrants' housing outcomes in traditional gateways and newly emerging destinations

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2012

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Abstract: It is now widely recognized (e.g., Lichter and Johnson 2009; Painter and Yu 2010) that immigrants are moving in large numbers to almost every metropolitan area and select rural areas in the country. This transformation has happened rapidly, and research is only beginning to assess the extent of immigrant integration and outcomes in these newer destinations. In the midst of these changes, the country has experienced a profound recession. To date, there has been little research on the impact of the recession on immigrants across the country. In this paper, we assess how the recent economic crisis has affected immigrants with respect to three housing outcomes- residential mobility, homeownership, and household formation. Although immigrants have been rapidly expanding their presence in newly emerging destinations and making fast in-roads into the housing markets, they may also be likely to be vulnerable because of the economic downturn. Because the impacts are likely to be diverse, we examine how the effects of the housing downturn vary by geography and by immigrant group. These effects will then be compared to U.S.-born residents to determine whether immigrants that live in metropolitan areas with different immigrant networks experience different effects that do the native populations.We use the 2006 and 2009 American Community Survey microdata to compare housing outcomes at two important time points in the recent economic cycle. After summarizing trends between groups and between metropolitan areas, we use multivariate models to control for individual characteristics and a number of important contextual variables at the metropolitan level. The results suggest the early impact of the recession has not been as hard on immigrants as one might expect. In particular, the places where immigrant populations are newest have not experienced reductions in homeownership as those in the large immigrant gateways. Even in the established gateways, the decline in homeownership has been smaller for immigrants than fornative born households. Regression results suggest that the negative impacts from the recession are strongest in the gateway metropolitan areas, and that have to controlling for residence in the hardest hit areas, changes in unemployment rates and increases in metropolitan level default rates have a negative impact on homeownership rates.

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Authors: Yu, Zhou; Painter, Gary

Publisher: University of Southern California

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Housing and Segregation, Migration and Immigration

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