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Leaving Gateway Metropolitan Areas: Immigrants and the Housing Market

Gary Painter and Zhou Yu
2004
Abstract: 
Immigration has long been a force that shapes the housing and labor markets in gateway metropolitan areas. Recently, the impact of immigration is being felt in an increasingly large number of metropolitan areas. This study focuses on the housing outcomes of households who currently live in the fourteen largest emerging gateways, with special focus give to those households that have left the six established gateway metropolitan areas. The findings suggest that those that households that move from most gateway metropolitan areas have lower homeownership rates than do households that move from within the metropolitan area. At the same time, there is little evidence that immigrants do no worse than native-born households that migrate within the United States. The study also demonstrates that immigrant households that live in crowded conditions or have multiple workers in the household have better homeownership rates than similar native born households, and that younger immigrant household are more successful in attaining homeownership than are similar native-born households.