Hispanics and housing, Chicago

POTENTIAL TRANSLATES INTO REALITY COMPRE UNA CASA-Buy a house CREDITO-Credit FINANCIAMENTO-Financing PARA LA VENTA-For Sale By Dennis Rodkin Special to the Tribune Published October 10, 2004 In the last couple of years, Carmelo Buttita has had quite a few people come through his model homes who speak only Spanish, or prefer to speak Spanish. And he's tired of it. But Buttita, sales manager at the Marcus Estates subdivision, is no chauvinist. He isn't insisting that Spanish speakers learn English. Instead, he says, "we need to learn Spanish -- all of us: real estate agents, lenders. The way the number of Hispanic buyers is growing, we need to educate ourselves to talk to them." You shouldn't expect to do business if you don't speak the language, notes Buttita. Apparently the housing and mortgage industries are coming around to that viewpoint, recognizing the growing strength and importance of the largest language minority in the nation. The numbers tell the story. Chicago-area Hispanics more than doubled their rate of homeownership in the 1990s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a rise that eclipsed the growth rate of any other minority population in any of the nation's major cities. By 2000, 49 percent of the region's Hispanics were homeowners -- more than any big-city minority group other than African-Americans in Washington, D.C. (who also had a homeownership rate of 49 percent) -- but still far lower than the 75 percent rate of homeownership among non-Hispanic whites nationally. And many sources in Chicago-area real estate believe the number of Hispanic buyers continues to grow. In 2002, Hispanics bought 12.7 percent of all the housing units sold in the city, according to data gathered by the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. "From Latinos, what you hear is, `Oh, it's our sueno, our dream, to have our own house,'" says Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California. Pachon's organization released a study in August that estimated at least 1.5 million U.S. Latino households will buy houses for the first time by 2010. The growing rate of ownership runs alongside the fact that the number of Hispanics is growing. Tracey Taylor, the head of the Chicago Association of Realtors' Cultural Diversity Committee, notes that the number of Chicago-area Hispanics grew from 545,000 in 1990 to 750,000 in 2000 and may by now have passed 1 million. (By some counts, the homeownership rate -- or the share of the Hispanic population that owns homes -- slipped slightly after 2000. But Pachon says a closer look at the data shows that the numbers of Hispanic births and immigrants have been so high the percentage goes down even as the population, and the number of home buyers, rises.) Some 65 percent of Chicago-area Hispanics are aged 18 to 49, "the prime years for buying houses," notes Marco Rodriguez, who with his wife, Amy Ceisel, publishes Nuestra Casa, a group of free real estate listing magazines targeting local Hispanics. With better education and incomes than the generation before them, they are better equipped to buy, Rodriguez says. http://www.chicagotribune.com/class...drealestate-hed I think this article is good news. There is one error in the report that I know of. The Tribune claims that the Chicago area has 750,000 Hispanics in 2000 when actually the city alone has 753,644 Hispanics in 2000, according to the census. They mixed up the City with the metro area. According to the census the Chicago area had 1.2 million Hispanics in 2000. If the City of Chicago has grown to now 1 million Hispanics in four years, an increase of 250,000, it will only be another few years before Hispanics are the largest group in the city. WOW. Also the growth of Hispanics is amazing. From 1990 to 2000 Chicago, the city, grew by roughly 200,000 Hispanics. From 2000 to 2004 Chicago, the city, grew by another 250,000 Hispanics. That is over double the growth rate of the 1990's. If the total population of the city really is holding steady since 2000, according to the census, that means a hell of a lot of people are moving out or has the Census just done a bad job with total population predictions as they did in the 1990's underestimating the city by 200,000 people. I really believe that having a diverse population is healthy for the city. Is it only coincidence that Chicago starting booming when immigration went through the roof in the 1990's? Look at the most successful cities in the U.S. they are the most diverse and have extremely high immigration numbers. in addition it makes life more interesting. On a side note but I think related to this immigration boom of not just Mexicans but other Hispanics and Asians, the two main immigration groups, is our downtown condo market. A coincidence again? I think not. According to the Appraisal Research Counselor's "Downtown Chicago Residential Benchmark Report," downtown condo sales in the second quarter of 2004 were 1454 sales for just downtown. That is almost 6000 a year for just downtown! We are going to blow away the paltry 28,000 sold in downtown in the past seven years for downtown. All this is happenning at the same time of high immigration growth.>