Thread: By the Numbers The Immigration Equation

Illegals have a new task .....buying our homes!!


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/reale ... ref=slogin

September 10, 2006

By DAMON DARLIN

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. Some will move to a smaller home or to their second home, others will move into a managed-care complex. And for some who never moved, it will be their estate making the sale. 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).
Demographers say there aren’t enough potential homeowners in the echo boom (the children of the baby boomers) or in the generation that comes after that (still without a catchy name) to soak up that supply, no matter how slowly it goes on the market. (It is presumed that the bulk of the Gen Xers will have done their home buying by then.)
Without sufficient demand, prices will fall. Masnick predicts that as many as 90 percent of the homes will be bought by native-born Americans. “But the last 10 percent is central,” he says. “Without that 10 percent, it will be a buyers’ market.”
The good news is that there are enough young first- and second-generation immigrants to do the job. The popular telling of the American dream that has Smith selling to Schmidt who then sells to Shapiro will record the next chapter with Sung and Sanchez doing the buying. Dowell Myers, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies the impact of demography on urban planning, says, “The odds are that a white baby boomer won’t be selling to another white.”
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.”
Demographers are sure this will come to pass, because they have studied the baby boom population bulge, or as they call it, “cohort dynamics.” And they see immigrants as another large cohort moving steadily upward. California, where more than 25 percent of the residents are immigrants, is their observation booth. “What happens in California is a precursor to what will happen in the rest of the United States,” says John Pitkin, who runs a demographic forecasting firm in Cambridge, Mass. “There is no question that real estate in California will be shaped by immigrants and their children.”
What forecasters have seen happen in California is encouraging. The per-household homeownership rate among native-born Americans is about 61 percent, 14 percentage points above the rate for immigrants. But immigrants who have lived in the United States for 30 years or more exceed the homeownership rate of native-born Americans by about 10 percentage points.
Myers now finds ownership rates of 60 percent among Hispanics in the Los Angeles area. “They are buying really cheap housing, but it creates a base of demand that pushes everyone up,” he says.
Myers also found that home prices rose faster in areas that Hispanics are moving to, like the Los Angeles County cities El Monte and Montebello, than in surrounding neighborhoods. According to figures compiled by Dataquick, prices for single-family homes in these cities rose at least 25 percent between 2004 and 2005, compared with the 20 percent average gain for all of the county. Prices in parts of Compton, a predominantly black city that has turned increasingly Hispanic, were up almost 40 percent in that one year. “Immigrants have strong upward mobility in housing,” Myers says.
If this all seems overly rosy, a 2006 Harvard housing study found that foreign-born residents already account for 37 percent of the new growth in households.
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?”
And while United States Census data now show that immigrants are spread all over the country — even well into suburban areas of the heartland — they certainly aren’t evenly dispersed. In 2000, more than half of the foreign-born population lived in just three states — California, New York and Texas — and in 10 metropolitan areas. And even though they continue to fan out into other areas in increasing numbers, there may not be enough of them to help homeowners in places like West Virginia and Indiana.
Predictions also become murky for demographers because no one knows what will happen to immigration in the next decade. Will borders really be tightened? Will illegal immigrants be deported?
Will amnesty be granted?
The political picture will have as much impact on the housing market as the demographic one will.

What can I say? We are just pieces on the chessboard to the elites to use at will! All I can say is that I pray that this will come back to haunt and utterly destroy those that are destroying this country!

I've read similiar articles that talk about how the boomers had small families, are getting old, etc. As if we need more people to replace them. Well, in my opinion there are too many people in this country, in the world for that matter. Seems we'd be a lot better off with less people. Sounds better to me. Plus I have lived in highly populated areas of California for years, there are toooooo many people here and the freeways are disastrous at times. I just don't agree with such theories. Probably globalist elitist blah blah to justify their agendas.

They'll just use contract for deed with multiple families paying and living in the residence. Seeing that here.