New Destination Housing Markets: The Effects of Metropolitan Housing Markets on the Changing Geography of Immigrant Settlement

Chris Galvan, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY)

Immigration has transitioned from a regionally isolated phenomenon to one of a highly dispersed nature. Despite the significance of such shifts, the literature lacks systematic studies of the factors contributing to foreign-born population growth in “new destinations.” Scholars have demonstrated that housing markets are strongly related to immigrant settlement patterns. However, the direction of this relationship is contested, and applications to new destinations do not exist. The purpose of this paper is to begin to fill these gaps by explicitly identifying and modeling key components of housing markets that contribute to new destination growth. I examine three decades of change using data from the Census Bureau, 2005-2009 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, and Bureau of Labor Statistics. In order to determine the factors contributing to growth I model metropolitan-level change in foreign-born population as an outcome of housing markets and a series of control variables.