Immigration Challenges Between 2002 and 2012, the National Association of Home Builders expects 1.7 million immigrants to enter the country each year. These newcomers typically aren’t ready to buy homes right away. “Most immigrants don’t have the financial wherewithal to buy a home, so they end up renting,” says Jeff Stack, managing director and partner of SARES-REGIS Group, a multifamily developer, manager, and builder in Irvine, Calif.
And, even as renters, immigrants are often forced to stay in tight quarters. A recent study from the National Housing Conference’s Center for Housing Policy, “America’s Newest Working Families: Cost, Crowding and Conditions for Immigrants,” concludes that low- to moderate-income immigrant working families (defined as earning between the minimum wage and 170 percent of the median income) are six times more likely than non-immigrants to live in crowded conditions. Defining crowded conditions as more than one person per room in a residence, the study finds that almost one in five immigrant working families who rent live in crowded conditions.
So, it would make sense that most immigrants want space at an affordable price. Hispanics often have three generations of one family under the same roof and certainly fit in this category, says Michael Costa, president of Simpson Housing Solutions LLC, an affordable housing developer in Long Beach, Calif. To accommodate these needs, Costa slowly started to add a limited number of three- and four-bedroom units in some of his communities. “We used to never build four-bedroom units, but now 40 percent of our units at some properties are four bedrooms,” he says.
Others are following this trend. In Houston, Trammell Crow is building a property with 1,000-square-foot units, but the property won’t have swimming pools, exercise rooms, or other amenities. Terwilliger hopes this will appeal to people on a budget who put more value on unit size than amenities. “I think minority households will probably want the kind of product we are offering in Houston,” he says. “That’s our bet, anyway.”
Digging Deeper In trying to meet Hispanic needs, Simpson Housing Solutions partnered with TELACU, a Hispanic nonprofit in Los Angeles, to learn about this demographic’s housings needs. Through its work with the Hispanic population, TELACU understands some of its often-overlooked needs, which include a lack of knowledge about available government services. So the nonprofit, which does some property management, acts as an educator, informing residents about free-ride programs for people without cars and other government services.
Regardless of the ethnic group, if a developer wants to reach a certain audience, he or she needs to advertise in the group’s local papers, draw up leases in native languages, and employ bilingual – or even multilingual – leasing agents.
At an A. F. Evans Co. Inc. property in San Francisco, 12 languages can be heard in the 540-unit building. Art Evans, president of the Oakland, Calif.-based development and property management company, felt it was important to hire leasing agents that had these language skills. While this might seem like a difficult goal, seven languages are represented in the leasing office.
Included in Evans’ renter mix are Asians, who are expected to add more than 500,000 new renters to the marketplace by 2010. To meet their needs, developers can often look at the blueprint used for Hispanics.
“One of the things we have found is that the Hispanic market has a lot of similarities to the Asian market,” says Randall Lewis, executive vice president of Lewis Apartment Communities, a multifamily manager and developer in Upland, Calif. Like Hispanics, Asian renters want bigger units with more bedrooms and family space.
But there are things important to certain segments of the Asian market that developers must be cognizant. For example, some Chinese are followers of feng shui, a method used to determine the best placement for different room and items in a building. This can be important in design.
“In a single-family building, opening the front door and having the stairway go straight up is bad feng shui,” says Paul Desmond, president of the Northern California portion of the Ryness Co., a multifamily and single-family builder based in Danville, Calif. A potential resident who adheres to feng shui may be less likely to live in a home with this design.
