![Sample our Geography journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5937/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Geography.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Rental affordability has become a major concern for most Americans since the 2007–2009 recession. Minorities and immigrants, especially in some emerging destination metropolises, have suffered disproportionally from its brunt. Nashville—a prominent southern destination—has not only experienced a considerable gain in diverse immigrant groups, but it has also witnessed skyrocketing housing prices and rents, making them beyond the affordability of even middle-class Americans. Rent burden patterns among racial/ethnic groups, especially the immigrants/foreign-born who are not yet citizens, remain largely unknown. Given Nashville’s suitability as an emerging metropolis reverberating as a nationally representative immigrant gateway, this article explores relationships between rent burden faced by immigrants and other racial/ethnic groups while examining neighborhood-level determinants captured in principal components derived from demographic, socioeconomic, occupation, and built-environment attributes. A newly devised rent burden index—previously applied for metropolises only—is calibrated to census tracts to test its validity in explaining intraurban variabilities. Through multitiered statistical and cartographic approaches, we find that the neighborhoods with higher diversity and a greater presence of foreign-born, noncitizens are the most rent-burdened; so are the tracts with well-off whites and Asians. Newly built neighborhoods associate negatively with the severely burdened category and median gross rent as a percentage of income, thus highlighting the significance of newer-built housing in mitigating rent burden.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In this article, we use toponyms Nashville, Nashville metropolis, the Nashville MSA, and the MSA interchangeably, which imply the entire metropolitan area of Nashville consisting of 13 counties. In other parts of the narrative, we often use the generic terms of cities and metropolises interchangeably, and when we imply the scalar-based geographic boundary definition with specifics of demographic composition for comparison, we use the words city/cities or MSA, accordingly, for clarity.
2 For better understanding of the creative class and creative cities, see Florida Citation2012, and his other books on this topic. Creative class refers to those people who relate themselves with the three Ts—tolerance, technology, and talent. Florida theorizes these people have higher levels of tolerance toward diversity of all sorts, including LGBTQ, are better equipped with the new-economy talents, and are enthusiastic about using technology, all of which cumulatively have changed the urban development and intraurban spaces in numerous U.S. cities. Florida’s “creative class” theory suggests that the cities that are diverse, tolerant, and “cool” will eventually outperform others (such as Nashville, Tennessee; Ashville, North Carolina; or San Francisco, California) because ethnic/diverse minorities, gay people, and counter-culturalists, in general, attract highly skilled, techno-savvy professionals—largely known as the “creative class”—and their presence in a city attracts well-paid jobs and dynamic companies.
3 Indeed, due to the fast racial/ethnic diversification of the southeastern United States and its major metropolises, which have grown not only due to Latino immigrants, but also other immigrants coming from Asian and African countries, Guerrero (Citation2017) suggests that our thinking about the “Nuevo South” should go beyond solely Latin American groups.
4 Though Lake (Citation2020) and a few others have discussed the effects of COVID-19 on rentals and evictions, this analysis focuses on rent burden as a long-term American issue in the 2010s. Hence, our study period pertains to the pre-pandemic situation, since the latest available data (one-year and three-year estimates) are still unreliable to delve into for a detailed post-COVID-19 analysis.
5 In this article, we compare the demographic data for the Nashville MSA only, and despite the use of the terms the Nashville MSA and Nashville interchangeably throughout the narrative, our data here pertain to the entire metropolitan area of Nashville. Indeed, the city of Nashville’s Latino population is twice that of the MSA according to the 2020 Census, aligning more with the national average.
6 This quantitative analysis is our first step toward understanding rent burden in the emerging gateway of Nashville, which is not our residential place. Hence, future in-depth, mixed-methods examination of this MSA is planned for our future research project.
7 For more on PCA, see Jolliffe and Cadima (Citation2016).
8 For brevity, we do not discuss other regression models with lower R2-values.