Transnational Tense: Immigration and Inequality in American Housing Markets

Abstract

Spatial assimilation theory, the traditional framework for analysing urban immigration and housing, was deeply shaped by the historical–geographic contingencies of American urbanism in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the most recent and forceful challenge to assimilationist research—transnational urbanism—is also influenced by distinctive contemporary circumstances and epistemological priorities, creating a tense and unproductive dichotomy. We contend that such apparently fundamental theoretical disputes are at least partially resolved through methodological pluralism. Understanding continuity and change in immigrant settlement and housing patterns requires that we draw on the distinct, complementary merits of transnational urbanist and spatial assimilation models—while also recognising the features of American urban development and race relations that create powerful incentives shaping the spatial trajectories of immigrant upward mobility. We evaluate these considerations through empirical case studies of the recent rise of home-ownership among Hmong immigrants in St Paul, Minnesota, and the interrelations between immigration and the intensified mortgage capitalisation of US housing markets.

Keywords:

• Transnational Urbanism
• Spatial Assimilation
• Immigration
• Home-Ownership
• US cities

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Dan Hiebert for organising the Metropolis conference on immigration and housing-market dynamics that inspired this paper, to Bob Murdie and Valerie Preston for valuable comments and questions, and to Gideon Bolt for guest-editing this JEMS special issue. We are also grateful to the referees for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes

1. David Ward (1987): 318) noted that trends cited in support of the spatial assimilation model ‘do not necessarily record a simple trajectory from inner-city ghetto to integrated suburb’.

2. We are indebted on this point to David Ley's (2004: 151) trenchant critique of the global-city hypothesis and its ‘ascription of mobility and universalism to the global’ versus ‘stasis and parochialism to the local’. See also Olds (1998).

3. It should also be noted that the comparative transnational field-research methods advocated by Smith and his colleagues are extraordinarily labour-intensive, a consideration that imposes severe limitations on the pace at which collective and cumulative advances can be made in the literature. Much of the transnational urbanist literature, therefore, has adopted a highly synthetic methodology, replacing field-based interviews and ethnographies with analyses of immigrant and ‘mainstream’ newspapers and other archival resources; we might best describe this approach, most clearly exemplified by Smith's fascinating and integrative chapter, ‘Reading Los Angeles from the Ground Up’, as open-source ethnography.

4. Clark (2002) offers an optimistic interpretation of falling segregation indices, but Dawkins’ (2004: 379) recent and more sobering review of urban research concludes: ‘Recent evidence suggests that household-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics explain only a small proportion of the racial differences in location choices. Racial processes such as prejudice and housing market discrimination continue to drive black–white segregation patterns’. Dawkins reviews a wide range of recent studies, including new hedonic research documenting a ‘decentralised racism’ in which whites outbid all others in their pursuit of all-white suburban neighbourhoods. On the broader urban implications of white privilege, see Pulido (2000). See also the innovative Harris and McArdle (2004) analysis of Census-based models of the spatial distribution of home-owners and shifting mortgage-lending patterns indicating that affordability does a poor job of explaining the persistence of racial segregation.

5. Unlike in Europe, these housing choices are basically limited to two sectors: the rental sector, divided by income into public subsidies and the private market, or the single, private-market ownership sector.

6. Unfortunately, their analysis remains vulnerable to the effects of self-selection bias: those immigrants the most likely to be able to move into home-ownership may have chosen destinations outside the traditional gateway cities; without corrections for this possibility, we cannot know what the locational variables are measuring.

7. For separate figures of market penetration in the home purchase and improvement markets, see Wyly et al. (2008).

8. A staff writer for the Los Angeles Times dryly observed that ‘People are cashing out so quickly that the term “homeowner” may soon be inaccurate. Fifty years ago, Americans owned, on average, three-quarters of their house and the lender owned the rest. These days, it's approaching an even split’ (Streitfeld 2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elvin K. Wyly

Elvin K. Wyly is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia

Deborah G. Martin

Deborah G. Martin is Assistant Professor of Geography at Clark University, 950 Main St., Worcester, MA 01610, USA

Pablo Mendez

Pablo Mendez is Doctoral Candidate in Geography at the University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada

Steven R. Holloway

Steven R. Holloway is Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia, GG Building, 210 Field St., Athens, GA 30602, USA