"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," says Jewell.
According to a recent analysis by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, U.S. household growth from 2005 through 2015 is projected to reach about 14.6 million, primarily due to greater numbers of immigrants. Immigrant households, a key driver of housing demand, are expected to rise from a little more than two-thirds now to more than three-quarters by 2020, according to an earlier Harvard study.
Although immigrants remain less likely to own a home and more likely to rent than native-born people, the Harvard study found that the foreign-born accounted for 13.8 percent of all homebuyers in 2005 who had moved in within the preceding four years, up from 11.4 percent in 2001.
In 2000, the most common surnames among U.S. homebuyers were Smith, Johnson, Brown, Williams and Miller. In 2005, Rodriguez and Garcia bumped out Brown and Miller, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a San Diego firm which analyzed deeds and county assessment data records across most of the U.S.
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 70's, 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 Dowell Myers, a University of Southern California professor who studies immigrants' upward mobility. "We face this issue of a generational housing bubble. Immigrant homebuyers are going to be much more important in the future.
"It's their kids that are going to be the ones who save us when the baby boomers are going to retire."
