The Geography of Hispanic Homeownership

Homeownership is core to the American Dream and US housing policy in part due to the many advantages homeownership can confer in American society: a financially privileged form of wealth-building and access to communities with healthy environments, prosperous schools, and well-connected neighbors. Policies to extend homeownership to low-income and minority households are coupled with a belief that these policies will not only diminish housing inequality but also reduce broader inequality by providing access to neighborhoods of opportunity. But not all neighborhoods are created equal, and minorities may not be able to purchase homes in the best suburban neighborhoods due to a combination of discrimination, historical redlining, and structural inequality. The vast majority of studies on Hispanic homeownership have examined barriers to entry or the influence of immigration on homeownership. Much less research focuses on how Hispanic families' experience with homeownership may also be contributing to inequalities. This dissertation focuses on where Hispanics own homes, and how the geography of homeownership may be contributing to inequality. This is especially important as spatial patterns of Hispanic settlement, housing construction, and poverty have shifted in recent decades. The results from this dissertation point to continued differences in the areas in which whites and Hispanics reside, even among homeowners. These findings highlight the multifaceted nature of housing inequality where outcomes that are typically thought of as integrative, like homeownership, can still produce highly unequal outcomes. This dissertation also draws attention to the changing nature of suburbs and conceptions around suburbs as the prime locations for homeownership.Chapter 2 examines trends in both Hispanic homeownership and suburbanization from 1990-2018 using the decennial censuses and the 2018 5-year American Community Survey for the 100 largest metro areas. By looking at the interaction of homeownership and location, this research explores the question of whether moves into homeownership by Hispanics have been coupled with moves to the suburbs (and the opportunity structures present in suburban communities), and whether suburbanizing Hispanics are able to capture the benefits of residential stability and wealth-building through homeownership in suburban neighborhoods. Results show that despite larger overall growth in the Hispanic suburban homeowner population, Hispanic homeownership rates grew more in cities. It additionally finds consistent deviation in homeownership-location trends between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, indicating differing relationships between homeownership and location for these groups.Chapter 3 uses a multinomial logit model to evaluate the determinants of joint tenure and location (defined as city/suburb) choice for Hispanic and white households, paying particular attention to measures of acculturation of Hispanic families, in addition to classic determinants of homeownership such as income, education, age, and household composition. The analysis finds that the Hispanic-white homeownership gap is predominantly a suburban gap and that traditional drivers of suburban homeownership are less strong for Hispanic families. These results suggest lingering barriers to homeownership among Hispanic families and that further research is needed to observe the impact of differing residential location on wealth-building and other homeownership outcomes.Chapter 4 examines whether Hispanics achieve neighborhood parity with whites through homeownership by comparing the neighborhoods of recent Hispanic and white homebuyers using the 2018 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data coupled with neighborhood information from the Decennial Census and 2014-2018 American Community Survey for the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas. It measures aggregate differences between the neighborhoods of Hispanic and white homebuyers, and uses regression models to test whether these differences hold for demographically and financially similar homebuyers. It also compares urban and suburban neighborhoods to examine whether neighborhood differences are attenuated or exacerbated based on urban/suburban location. It finds that Hispanic buyers are purchasing homes in neighborhoods with greater racial segregation and economic disadvantage (as measured through poverty rates, median incomes, and median home values), and with greater racial change and economic decline, even after controlling for demographic, financial, and loan characteristics of the buyer. It also finds that the gaps in neighborhood characteristics between Hispanics and whites are often just as large in suburbs as in cities, and that smaller suburban gaps are a result of declining conditions in suburbs relative to cities