Caught in the Housing Bubble: Immigrants' Housing Outcomes in Traditional Gateways and Newly Emerging Destinations

Gary Painter, University of Southern California
Zhou Yu, University of Utah

Immigrants are moving in large number to almost every metropolitan area in the country. This transformation has happened rapidly and coincided with a profound economic recession in recent years. We plan to assess how the recent economic crisis has affected immigrants with respect to four specific housing outcomes--residential mobility, homeownership, household formation, and residential overcrowding. 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.