Immigrants The Answer To U.s. Housing Dilemmas

(The slowing housing market has prompted just about every real estate and mortgage expert to chime in and try to find a solution to this seemingly growing problem.)

There is a surplus of homes on the market, and not enough potential buyers to even think about taking care of the problem.

So now forecasters and analysts are saying that immigrants could be the answer to all of our housing problems.

A September 10, 2006 article by Damon Darlin of The New York Times, “The immigration equation,” discusses how immigrants could be the key to getting our housing market back on its feet again.

“It’s often said that immigrants do the jobs Americans don’t want to do. They’ve just been assigned another task: Buy the homes of the baby boom generation. But this task is one that native-born Americans simply can’t do. There won’t be enough of them.”

“Many of the 78 million boomers, the first of whom turn 60 this year, will sell their property over the next two decades, says George Masnick, a research affiliate with the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. What many boomers should be asking right now is who will buy their 34 million homes. The buyers may well be immigrants, and not necessarily legal ones (about 12 million of the 35 million foreign-born people in America are illegal immigrants, according to estimates from the Center for Immigration Studies, in Washington).”

The problem with the housing market right now is that there are not enough native-born Americans to buy all of the houses that are on the market or that are going on the market in the very near future.

With no demand for these homes, the prices will naturally fall continuing the reign of the buyer’s market. But luckily, everyone dreams of coming to America and there should be enough immigrants to get our market going again or at least save it from complete failure.

“He or she will be selling to what we today call a minority, though in many communities, whites may then be in the minority. ‘The immigrants will take up the slack,’ Myers says, ‘and it will be huge.’ The even better news, Masnick says, is that ‘the second-generation immigrants will hit the housing market just when they are needed most.’”

Analysts are already seeing good things happen in California, as more than 25 percent of the residents are immigrants. They are already staring to buy up real estate in many of California’s cities.

Although experts are seeing some progress in certain parts of the country, and it is quite possible it will spread to other parts of the country, nothing is set in stone.

“But it’s no sure thing that immigrants will save the day. A lot can go wrong. ‘The danger is downward mobility,’ says Fred Siegel, a professor at the Cooper Union for Science and Art, who has studied immigration patterns. ‘If a significant portion of recent immigrants are downwardly mobile, then that is bad news for the boomers. Who will afford the McMansions?’”

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