Posted on 11/06/2005 2:53:43 PM PST by SmithL
The Bravos were legal homeowners before they were legal residents.
After nearly a decade living in a "dangerous" part of Richmond, the couple from Mexico City -- Guadalupe, 50, and Javier, 52 -- closed on a nearly $400,000 Pinole home in 2003.
They had saved up money from years of cleaning homes and doing maintenance work, employed their daughter as an interpreter for their dealings with a real estate agent and found a mortgage lender that required only the tax identification number available to anyone who works in the United States.
A growing number of banks are providing such loans, opening opportunities for families like the Bravos, who wouldn't become legal residents until months later.
"We always dreamed of having our own home," Guadalupe Bravo said through a translator.
More and more Latinos are achieving that dream in the East Bay. It's a trend that reflects and promises to accelerate their increasing wealth, growing clout as consumers and just plain growth, according to experts.
Census figures aren't available because the Census Bureau last tabulated home ownership levels by ethnicity in 2000. At that point, the Latino home ownership rate stood at 56.5 percent versus 73.7 percent among whites in Contra Costa County, and 44.7 percent versus 61.9 percent in Alameda County.
But two sets of data indicate a dramatic shift is under way. First, the number of home loans originated by Latinos in Alameda and Contra Costa counties jumped from 3,589 worth $539.1 million in 1999, to 12,215 worth $3.1 billion in 2004, according to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, which creates standards for government scrutiny of financial firms.
That's a 240.3 percent leap in the number of loans approved for Latinos, versus a 31.6 percent increase among whites.
Second, there has been a notable change in the most frequent surnames of home buyers in Contra Costa, considered a proxy by the real estate industry for demographic shifts not yet captured by statistics.
Just four of the top 10 surnames were those typically of Latino origin during the first half of 2000, with Gonzalez, Hernandez, Garcia and Rodriguez ranking third, fifth, sixth and ninth, respectively, according to DataQuick Information Systems. Smith and Johnson filled the top two slots.
In the first half of 2005, however, the top six most frequent surnames were all Latino-sounding: Garcia, Martinez, Rodriguez, Gonzalez, Lopez and Hernandez, in descending order. A similar shift has occurred on the state level.
The change is a welcome one for Latino leaders, as home ownership is viewed as the most effective means of building ties to the community and creating wealth. The latter is an important consideration for a community that is three times more likely to live in poverty than whites, according to a 2003 policy brief by the Latino Issues Forum.
"Having a home allows you to have that financial stability ... and transfer wealth" to subsequent generations, said Raquel Donoso, deputy director at the San Francisco-based organization.
This has implications for the wider economy, insofar as the more wealth Latinos create, the more they will spend.
As such, retailers, employers and cities all need to pay attention to these changes, said Bruce Kern, executive director of the Economic Development Alliance for Business.
"It speaks to the type of retail mix that (should be) provided," he said. "Communities, as they plan, must try to connect the new residents into the life of the community, so that they really feel the community is a place to live, work and recreate."
But for all the progress, Donoso stressed that Latino ownership rates still rank "at the bottom of the ladder."
From 1990 to 2000, Latino home ownership only ticked up from 40.4 percent to 43.7 percent in California, a period during which their population increased 86 percent, according to the Latino Issues Forum. A number of obstacles still stand in the way, including language barriers, residency status, credit history, cultural differences and poverty.
Three major trends, however, are allowing Latino home buyers to increasingly surmount these challenges, said Carlos Baradello, a professor at the University of San Francisco and a general partner at Sienna Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in companies targeting Latino consumers. The sheer number of Latinos is swelling, the population's buying power is expanding and lenders are becoming more accommodating of nontraditional borrowers, as exemplified by the case of the Bravos.
Given these trends, Latinos will represent 40 percent of first-time home buyers by 2012, predicts the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.
"The Hispanic market has been for so long an invisible market," Baradello said. "What we're experiencing is they're coming from the invisible to visible; they're (underscoring) an economic, political and social transformation of the United States."
I wonder how latinos will feel when the Democrats tell them that it is now their job to fork over money for others who refuse to work?
More Latinos owning owns. Uh-Oh, that's bad news for the Libs.
Of course they can afford homes. They don't pay taxes. It's easier that way.
I guess there is a lot to say about those "jobs Americans don't want to do."
Don't be that stupid...
And through all of this time they still didnt take the time to learn how to speak ENGLISH
or to pay for for the ones who dont pay taxes
This is how we artificially inflate housing prices by boosting demand. When the Baby Boomers retire and look to downsize to smaller residences by cashing out their equity, the real estate market will crash unless the open border continues. Sad.
Yeah, that's the ticket. We can get the illegal immigrants to work for all of us.
Naahh... They'll just sit back and let them develop the property until its value rises, then seize it under eminent domain to turn over to their favorite agenda-builders.
-PJ
Not really. There is a lot of undeveloped land. Housing price aren't increasing because there isn't enough land, they are increasing because there is no (legally) developable land close to the jobs. Zoning laws are the prime drivers of housing price increases. Or more specifically, the fact that towns don't want to zone residential because they don't want to pay for the public schools. This forces people live further and further away from their work, or to pay a small fortune on their house.
Depends on where you live. The sprawl in Dallas continues unabated. Zoning and land development laws are not stopping it. The prices are artificially boosted by illegal immigration. Estimates are that 1 out of 5 million living in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex are immigrants. Most aren't legal.
That is the liberal mindset: problem X keeps getting worse and worse despite all our efforts to centrally plan.
Zoning and land development laws are not the solution, they are the problem. If we restore lost property rights back to the people this problem will go away.
I do not like illegal immigrants making use of taxpayer services any more than you do. But in this particular case they are not to blame.
I never said that zoning and land development should be used to stop urban sprawl in Dallas. I noted that it was not the cause of artificially inflated prices here. Illegal immigration is the primary cause here. Suspect it is the same in California. Likely different in the Northeast...for now.
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