The blossoming housing recovery stands to benefit from efforts to revamp U.S. immigration laws. A Mortgage Bankers Association study projects that the number of foreign-born homeowners will increase by 2.8 million in the 10 years ending in 2020, versus the 2.4 million gain in the previous decade.
Meanwhile, new research by the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals concludes that the increase could be even bigger if more opportunities for homeownership are made available to undocumented workers.
According to that study, immigrants hold more positive views of homeownership than native-born Americans and, consequently, are more likely to buy a house the longer they live in the country. An immigration bill giving non-citizens legal status could generate more than $100 billion in new mortgages and create 3 million more home buyers over the next several years, NAHREP estimates.
The MBA’s study, which did not take the potential impact of new immigration laws into consideration, projects that by 2020, 61 percent of Hispanic immigrants who arrived here nearly 40 years earlier will own a home.
USC public policy professor Dowell Myers, who penned the MBA study, concludes, “We’ve probably underappreciated this powerful force that is already resident here and is so upwardly mobile that it pushes up the housing market from the bottom. There’s this incremental momentum that’s built up.”
Source: “Immigrant Dreams to Keep Sparking U.S. Housing Recovery,” Business Week
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