Race/Ethnicity and Homeownership in an Emerging Immigrant Gateway of the US Southeast: A Neighborhood Scale Analysis

Owning a home has become a distant, often unattainable dream for many Americans since the 2007–2009 recession. The shortage of homes has decreased affordability, forcing 43 million U.S. households to become renters rather than owners. Racially targeted policies and widespread discrimination, coupled with neoliberal urban renewal policies, have forced communities of color, especially immigrants and the foreign-born, at the greatest disadvantage in homeownership. This paper examines tract-scale disparities in homeownership across major racial/ethnic groups. Using the U.S. Census Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) 2019 definition of the 13-county-metropolitan statistical area (MSA) of Nashville, Tennessee, as the study area, I use five-year American Community Survey (ACS) (2015–2019) data estimates to examine the spatial disparity in homeownership and its predictors. Nashville MSA is one of the fastest-growing southern gateways, and it is also the largest, most diverse, and most intermixed metropolis in Tennessee. It contains higher than the state’s overall share of foreign-born, and during 2019–2040, its share of immigrants is projected to grow by 40.7%, making it the best-suited laboratory for race/immigrant-focused research on housing. This analysis finds significant differences in race-based mean per-capita income, with Whites ($32,522) and Asians ($32,556) at the top, whereas Blacks ($25,062) and Hispanics ($20,091) are at the lowest. The ratio of race-based per-capita-income-versus-median housing values is the highest for Whites (15.19) and Asians (15.07) and the lowest for Blacks (11.49) and Hispanics (9.27), putting these two groups as the most disadvantaged regarding their affordability. Regression models suggest lower White homeownership in higher diversity tracts among foreign-born-not-citizens (FBNCs), whereas Black and Hispanic homeownerships are higher in tracts with higher diversity among FBNCs. Interestingly, Asian homeownership is high in tracts with high-income Black tracts, pointing toward the increasing significance of class.