Housing Outcomes of Immigrants in New and Traditional Destinations During the Great Recession

Beginning in the 1990s immigrants to the United States have increasingly moved away from the traditional gateway cities and begun settling in new destinations. Although the traditional destinations, California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Illinois still have the highest number of foreign-born, since 1990 the states with the largest percent growth of immigrant population have all been new destinations such as North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and South Carolina.  In the midst of these changes, the country has experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, now known as the Great Recession. After more than a decade of growth, the number of foreign-born households declined in 2008. To date however, there has been little research on the impact of the Great Recession on immigrants in the United States.

Gary Painter (University of Southern California) and Zhou Yu (University of Utah) will assess how the Great Recession has affected housing outcomes for immigrants in both new and traditional destinations. They will use the 2005 and 2009 American Community Survey to study how the recession has impacted four housing outcomes—home ownership, household formation, residential overcrowding, and residential mobility—for three groups (foreign-born Latinos, foreign-born Asians, and native-born) in traditional destinations, new destinations, and mid-size metropolitan areas. Painter and Yu expect that outcomes for immigrants are likely to vary greatly across destinations due to a number of factors, such as social networks, selective migration, housing prices, and changing economic and employment conditions. In addition, they expect that outcomes will differ for Asian and Latino immigrants.