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Access to Homeownership: Race-Ethnicity, Immigrant Status, and Changing Demographics Author: Zhou Yu Dissertation School: University of Southern California Pages: 245 Publication Date: December 2005 Availability: Abstract: Immigration has been one of the fundamental forces that shape urban America. While the society urges immigrants to become "real" Americans, assimilation is rarely smooth. Immigrants' assimilation is well manifested in their housing outcomes, because housing is central to the American Dream and is a critical element of federal policies. This dissertation uses the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the decennial censuses to examine immigrants' housing attainment and residential assimilation in the 1990s, focusing on three housing outcomes--homeownership, residential locations, and crowding. The study, couched in the historical context of immigration, also documents the characteristics of contemporary immigrants. Findings suggest that the relative success of contemporary immigrants is in stark contrast to their early predecessors who endured much hardship. While immigrants still lag behind native-born residents, they are upwardly mobile and gradually improve their housing outcomes. Large differences exist across populations, metropolitan areas, and between decades. Economic success leads to higher housing attainment, but not necessarily to residential assimilation. Asian immigrants are well endowed and have high homeownership rates to begin with, but they are slow in residential integration with native-born residents. In contrast, Latino immigrants follow the traditional path of assimilation and improve steadily from their initially low levels. Furthermore, Asians have a very low rate of renter household formation, which also helps explain their relatively high homeownership rate. Migration is an important stage of assimilation. Immigrants who migrate away from gateways have higher homeownership rates than those who replace them. Therefore, migration deserves more attention in the assimilation literature. The three housing outcomes yield substantially different results. While immigrants quickly increase homeownership, their crowding does not significantly decline. Immigrants are also slow in spatial dispersion, having limited direct impacts on the outward sprawl of urban form. Furthermore, immigrants tend to live in crowded conditions and in high-density areas, which may be reflective of their cultural preference and considered as a trade-off for homeownership attainment. Assimilation is a dynamic and multidimensional process. Social adaptation and economic incorporation seem to have progressed in different speeds. Policy implications and future research topics are also discussed. |
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