Immigrant Housing in Detroit

Research has demonstrated that immigrants are signiicant contributors to regional economic growth and prosperity in numerous ways, including providing important complementary talent across the workforce (both highskilled talent and service industry jobs), creating jobs, economic activity, and tax base as immigrant entrepreneurs, helping to invest in distressed urban neighborhoods, and more. This is especially true in Midwest metropolitan areas like Detroit. Immigrants ofer one of the few sources of population growth in the Detroit region, where the U.S.-born population continues to decline, especially within the city of Detroit.

Surveying the housing demands and perspectives of 200 Detroit residents highlights some important opportunities for city neighborhood and community planners, developers, and advocates. Immigrants express the same desires to be homeowners as U.S.-born to be homeowners but are currently less  likely to own their home. The survey indicates that significant differences in “financial literacy” (particularly as measured by knowledge of personal credit scores and possession of a bank account) exist between immigrants and non-immigrants in Detroit. Investing in programs and resources to build the “inancial literacy” of immigrant Detroiters will likely produce signiicant opportunities for homeownership and neighborhood stabilization.

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