Immigrants Provide Bright Spot In Otherwise Grim Housing Market

"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 University's Joint Center for Housing Studies 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.

"With rising purchasing power, the nation's growing number of foreign-born residents is 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."

"As we come out of 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."

"Immigrants are buying up the bottom of the housing market," said Myers, the USC professor. "And if the bottom is soft, prices collapse. A small home is pushing up the market, keeping home values up for the Hollywood Hills mansions."

Looking more than a decade ahead, immigrants and their children are being counted on to buy up much of the forecasted glut of homes for sale when baby boomers enter their 70s - an age when many will move to retirement communities and assisted living centers or die.

"There are not going to be enough white, native-born people to buy all those homes," said Myers, the USC professor. "We face this issue of a generational housing bubble. Immigrant homebuyers are going to be much more important in the future."