A recent study from the Community Service Society has determined that Mexican immigrant households are the having been hit hardest by the housing situation in New York.
The New York anti-poverty advocacy and research group’s study, released Wednesday, suggests that Mexican immigrants are most likely to have overcrowded homes and spend more than half their income on housing.
The report, titled, “Housing the City of Immigrants,” states that about 43 percent of all Mexican immigrant households are overcrowded, while only 13 percent of immigrants overall experience the same. It was also found that around 35 percent of Mexican households spend more than half of their income on rent, as opposed to 26 percent of immigrant households in general, and the average of 24 percent of all households.
The report’s authors, Tom Waters and Victor Bach, wrote, “Immigrants as a whole experience worse housing conditions than other New Yorkers. They pay a larger share of their income in rent and they are twice as likely to live in crowded conditions.”
Waters and Bach did not provide reasons for the difference, but did observe that while home ownership from one generation to the next went up, the increase was dramatic among low-income immigrants, climbing from 17 percent among first-generation households to 34 percent among second-generation households.
Director of the Immigration Research Initiative at the Fiscal Policy Institute, David Dyssegaard Kallick, said the report could be a reflection of low-income immigrants being “pushed prematurely into home ownership by predatory lending.”
Interestingly, 61 percent of the city’s Dominican immigrants occupied rent-controlled or rent-stabilized homes, with the study’s authors speculating that Dominicans first settled in areas that had already been established by Puerto Rican, and there, was a large number of homes with regulated rent.
