ABSTRACT
Homeownership is an important symbol of a middle-class standard of living and residential assimilation in the United States. This study explores the rate of advancement into homeownership of immigrants, relative to native borns, in Southern California, a principal region of immigrant settlement. The American Dream is the promise of economic reward for hard work in a land of opportunity. Survey researchers consistently report that homeownership is one of the most widely shared and important goals among US residents. Dowell Myers and J. Wolch found that the pattern of cohort succession shifted in the 1980s. Older cohorts were surpassing their predecessors, leading to substantial rises in homeownership rates in the elderly age range. The practical consequence of treating age in the cross-section but immigration duration in cohorts is that immigrants are compared unfairly to the native born. A potential bias of cohort analysis is that membership in regionally defined cohorts is not closed, due to both in- and out-migration.
