Abstract
Housing costs are a substantial component of US household expenditures. Those who allocate a large proportion of their income to housing often have to make difficult financial decisions with significant short-term and long-term implications for adults and children. This study employs cross-sectional data from the first wave of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey collected between 2000 and 2002 to examine the most common US standard of housing affordability, the likelihood of spending 30 % or more of income on shelter costs. Multivariate analyses of a low-income sample of US-born Latinos, whites, African Americans, authorized Latino immigrants, and unauthorized Latino immigrants focus on baseline and persistent differences in the likelihood of being cost burdened by race, nativity, and legal status. Nearly half or more of each group of low-income respondents experience housing affordability problems. The results suggest that immigrants’ legal status is the primary source of disparities among those examined, with the multivariate analyses revealing large and persistent disparities for unauthorized Latino immigrants relative to most other groups. Moreover, the higher odds of housing cost burden observed for unauthorized immigrants compared with their authorized immigrant counterparts remains substantial, accounting for traditional indicators of immigrant assimilation. These results are consistent with emerging scholarship regarding the role of legal status in shaping immigrant outcomes in the United States.
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Notes
In this study, Latinos are an ethnic group that can be of any race; whites and blacks/African Americans refer to those who are not Hispanic. Differences between these three groups are referred to as race/racial differences.
This definition of unauthorized immigrants follows the “unauthorized residents” terminology used by the US Department of Homeland Security (Hoefer et al. 2010).
See Donato and Armenta (2011) for a recent literature review of unauthorized migration.
This study treats immigrants’ legal status as a characteristic of individuals, but recognizes that legality/illegality and authorized/unauthorized are complicated, transitory, and socially constructed concepts based on immigration policy and actions of the US state (e.g., De Genova 2004; Menjívar 2011).
Although this study focuses on nativity and legal status differences among Latinos, other sources of intra-Latino heterogeneity include country of origin/descent, skin tone, social class, and location in the United States (e.g., Espino and Franz 2002; Rodríguez et al. 2008; Telles and Ortiz 2008; Frank et al. 2010).
In households with children under the age of 18, the mother of a randomly selected child was designated the primary caregiver (PCG) and completed a parent questionnaire. In most households, the PCG and the RSA were the same person (RSA/PCG) or in the same nuclear family. In other households, more than one nuclear family resided in the home, and the RSA and the PCG could be from different nuclear families and both families could have filled out the household survey depending on respondent selection criteria. See Peterson et al. (2004) for more details about respondent selection. Due to concerns about correlated errors and inadvertent double-counting of housing cost, income, and other information on households with two different nuclear families, this study excludes respondents who were in a “second” nuclear family.
HUD income limits are calculated for metropolitan areas and for non-metropolitan counties of every state and vary by size. Income limits for each fiscal year are available at: http://www.novoco.com/low_income_housing/facts_figures/income_limits.php.
Two thousand five hundred and forty-three RSAs fully completed the Adult module (Peterson et al. 2004: Table 2.8). The analytic sample is substantially smaller because of the exclusion of higher-income respondents, white and black immigrants (due to small sample size), and US- and foreign-born Asians and Pacific Islanders (due to small sample size and heterogeneity). Finally, the sample also excludes the few respondents who reported housing cost burdens of 100 % or more, based on concerns about the quality of their housing cost and/or income data.
Nearly 30 % of LAFAN’s respondents are missing one or more components of income (Peterson, Sastry, et al. 2004); the imputed income file is used when income data are missing.
About 90 % of the pooled sample live in households where the RSA or RSA/PCG is the household head, the head’s spouse/partner or the biological, step, adopted, or foster children of the head.
Imputed data for rent and mortgage payment from the imputed income file created for L.A.FANS (Bitler and Peterson 2004) were employed when housing cost data were missing.
L.A.FANS asked homeowners about the value of their home and asked homeowners with mortgages whether the mortgage amount included taxes or property insurance. For homeowners who reported that their mortgage payment excluded one or both of these items, their housing costs were increased to reflect both their mortgage and these other items based on alternate information. For homeowners who reported that their mortgage payment does not reflect property taxes, their housing costs also include annual property taxes of 1.16 %, the average property tax rate for Los Angeles County (Christensen and Esquivel 2010) based on the self-assessed value of their home provided to L.A.FANS. Housing costs for respondents who reported that their mortgage payments did not reflect homeowners’ insurance premiums were increased to include the average homeowners’ annual premium for California from US Census Bureau data for the year that the respondent was surveyed. Finally, housing costs for homeowners without mortgages are the sum of estimated property taxes and homeowners’ insurance based on the value of their home.
Approximately 76 % of Latinos in the final analytic sample identify as “Mexican/Mexicano” or “Mexican-American,” about the same proportion of Latinos identifying as Mexican in Los Angeles County (72 %) (US Census Bureau Table PCT011). The remainder indicate birth/descent in countries of Central America or other Latin American countries.
Correlation analyses and multicollinearity diagnostics, not shown, indicate that these two variables are weakly associated, thus reducing concerns that including both variables in the specification biases the results.
Ancillary analyses, not shown, indicate significant variation in this variable between authorized and unauthorized Latino immigrants. Alternative operationalizations of US experience were explored, such as continuous variable for years in the United States and percent of life spent in the United States (a la Greif 2009; McConnell 2012), neither are linked with cost burden.
L.A.FANS data include a home language variable, indicating whether the respondent and other household members speak English or Spanish. Ancillary analyses show that using survey language or home language produces nearly identical descriptive and multivariate results.
The mean ratio of housing costs to income for the pooled sample is 38.8 %, with unauthorized Latino immigrants having the highest allocation of income to housing, averaging 42.4 % of income on housing costs.
For example, unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for most transfer/public assistance programs, but their US-citizen children may be eligible for some programs. See Capps et al. (2002) for more information.
Immigrant respondents surveyed in L.A.FANS generally report long-term US residence; about 59 % arrived in the United States in the 1970s or the 1980s (Peterson et al. 2004: 212).
The general rule of thumb is that multicollinearity can be a serious problem when variance inflation factors (VIF) are 10 or higher (Menard 1995). Collinearity diagnostics for both models indicate VIF below 2.6 for every variable, with a mean VIF of 2.1 for the baseline model and 1.53 for the full model.
The specifications presented in Table 3 were carried out with a pooled sample of higher-income respondents. A comparison of the main effects of interest from those specifications, not shown, with the main effects presented in Table 3 reveals that the primary conclusions drawn in this paper are robust.
Taking the reciprocal of the odds ratio is another standard interpretation. For example, whites have odds that are 36 % lower than unauthorized Latino immigrants in the baseline model and 39 % lower in the full model (top panel, Table 3).
Additional logistic regression analyses (baseline and full model) with the pooled sample using alternative categorizations of Latinos that do not explicitly focus on nativity and legal status, such as a single indicator for Latino (versus white or black) or three indicators for Latino ethnicity (Mexican, Central American, Other Latino), reveal that neither one is significantly associated with housing cost burden.
Estimates of the fully standardized coefficients developed by Long and Freese (2003), not shown, indicate that homeownership and marital status are especially powerful predictors of the outcome.
Ancillary logistic regression analyses, not shown, using a continuous variable of education indicate that it is not independently associated with housing cost burden, net of covariates. Given the inclusion of Latino immigrants in the sample, operationalizing education using a binary indicator tapping into Latino immigrants’ average level of education is more useful.
The significant F-adjusted mean residual goodness-of-fit statistic suggests that the model lacks fit with the data (p = .0165). A simulation study suggests that the F-adjusted mean residual goodness-of-fit test has a higher rate of a Type I error with data comprised of small number of clusters (Archer et al. 2007). This result may be due to the relatively few clusters, sixty-five, in the L.A.FANS data.
Collinearity diagnostics for the immigrant-only analyses indicate VIFs of 1.0, 1.33, and 1.35 (first, second, and third columns, respectively, Table 5).
Supplementary analyses with a sample including higher-income respondents (not shown) indicate that in the baseline model, US-born Latinos are less likely to be cost burdened than both immigrant groups. Net of the same background variables used in the fully specified model in Tables 3 and 4, US-born Latinos of all income levels are equally likely to be housing cost burdened as authorized immigrants but less likely to cost burdened than unauthorized immigrants.
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Acknowledgments
This research is supported by Grant R03 HD058915-01A1 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. The author appreciates the research assistance of Tun Lin Moe and the suggestions of the editor and an anonymous reviewer on earlier versions of the manuscript. All errors of fact and interpretation are the sole responsibility of the author.
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McConnell, E.D. Who has Housing Affordability Problems? Disparities in Housing Cost Burden by Race, Nativity, and Legal Status in Los Angeles. Race Soc Probl 5, 173–190 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-013-9086-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-013-9086-x