Blue Mass Group

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Immigrant impact on the US housing market

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One of the many things missing from the right’s discussion of immigration is the tremendous, quiet presence of immigrants (legal and not) in the American economy.  Particularly in the current housing downturn, it’s telling to see the impact that foreign-born Americans are having on the housing market:

With rising purchasing power, the nation’s growing number of foreign-born residents are keeping the bottom from falling out. And amid slow demand from an aging and slow-growing native population, immigrants are fueling predictions of a rebound.

Assuming Congress doesn’t impose further restrictions, immigrants — both legal and illegal — and their native-born children are forecast to provide the bulk of coming years’ growth in homebuying demand, nudging the market back up and aiding the broader economy.

U.S. household growth from 2005 through 2015 is projected to reach about 14.6 million — about 2 million greater than in 1995-2005 — primarily because of greater numbers of immigrants, according to a recent analysis by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Most native-born children of immigrants are classified as minorities, and minorities’ share of new U.S. households — a key driver of housing demand — is expected to rise from a little more than two-thirds now to more than three-quarters by 2020, according to an earlier Harvard study.

“As we come out of the this housing recession, immigrants will continue to have an ever-larger role,” said Dowell Myers, a University of Southern California professor who studies immigrants’ upward mobility. “If you were to stop immigration, it would be devastating, because it would eventually pull this huge chunk out of the housing market’s foundation.”

I happened to be in California during last year’s marches for immigration, and can only hope that the power and presence demonstrated then – across the country, but especially in states like CA with especially significant immigration populations – is carried through in Congress’s debates on immigration.

Full article on Channel 5.

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Comments

  1. is this really a significant sub population among homebuyers?  if your answer is yes, how did you come to that conclusion?

    • http://www.theboston…

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      That’s channel 5’s web site.

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      Click onto google, copy a few lines into their little search box, and up pops the link (or links) if there is one.  I’ve done that lots of times.

      • So sorry about that.  Link to the full article has been added. 

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        Laurel, to your point:

        Immigrants formed more than 40 percent of the new households the nation added from 2000 to 2005, up from a less than 30 percent share of net new households in the 1990s and about 15 percent in the 1980s, the Harvard center found in its latest annual housing market study.

        “The number of new homes being built is sensitive to the number of households added, which is why immigration is so important to the housing market,” said Eric Belsky, the center’s executive director.

        From 2000 to 2005, the nation added more than 1.2 million immigrants per year, the Harvard study found. That boosted the nation’s foreign-born to more than 12 percent of overall population, a level last seen in the 1930s.

        Although immigrants remain less likely to own a home and more likely to rent than native-born people, the Harvard study found that the foreign-born accounted for 13.8 percent of all homebuyers in 2005 who had moved in within the preceding four years, up from 11.4 percent in 2001.

        The numbers are much higher in some immigrant-rich states. In California, nearly one-third of recent homebuyers were foreign-born in 2005. For New York, New Jersey and Florida, the figures were between one-quarter and one-fifth.

        • you claim that “immigrants (legal and not) ” are buying homes, and i asked you to provide some information backing up the “not” claim.  but the article you quote above just talks about immigrants, not their legal status.  pardon my nitpickiness, but people too frequently (deliberately?) confuse “immigrant” with “lawbreaker”.  it is sometimes true, but by no means always.

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          another, perhaps more important question: why does it matter where home buyers were born? 

          • My point with “immigrants (legal and not)” is that so many people ignore the impact that legal AND illegal immigrants have on the American economy.  And even if the work of legal immigrants is noted, the contributions of illegal immigrants are almost universally ignored.

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            Last year’s immigration marches were supposed to highlight, among other things, how small businesses and other economic players rely on the work of illegal immigrants — often at the same time that they blast illegal immigration and advocate for expelling people from the US!

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            My posting of the homebuying article was as part of this larger discussion.  And I would argue that it’s worth noting where homebuyers were born if it helps to highlight the very significant contribution of immigrants to the US economy.

            • acknowledging the role that immigrants play in this economy, and the contributions immigrants make to the country.  However, I’m not sure you do your argument service by introducing an assertion that you can’t back up with fact.  That is, the assertion that non-legal immigrants are buying real estate in the US.  That is the only point I’m trying to make.

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