A Dream Deferred? Residential Attainment among Minority and Immigrant Groups in the United States
Open Access
- Author:
- Marlay, Matthew C.
- Graduate Program:
- Sociology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 29, 2008
- Committee Members:
- Barrett Alan Lee, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Ralph Salvador Oropesa, Committee Member
Susan Welch, Committee Member
Stephen Matthews, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Homeownership
suburbs
suburbanization
American Dream
Residential inequality
Residential preferences
Residential mobility - Abstract:
- The American Dream is handy shorthand for having “made it” in the United States. Yet what does “the American Dream” mean, exactly? We use the phrase cavalierly, but its precise definition remains elusive. For most people, though, the American Dream entails owning one’s own home, preferably in the suburbs. Operationalizing this amorphous concept, sociologists have developed the residential attainment framework to assess the degree to which minorities and immigrants have progressed in attaining residential equality with whites. This model has traditionally relied on two outcomes: homeownership and suburbanization; if the ownership rate and suburban proportion of minorities is approximately equal to that of whites, then the minority group has attained residential equality. In this work, I examine the residential outcomes of minorities and immigrants in U.S. metropolitan areas while broadening the residential attainment framework in several key ways. First, I include attitudes. The usual assumption is that everyone aspires to the same housing outcomes, an assumption that has remained mostly untested. Using data from Fannie Mae, I examine attitudes of members of different minority groups to ascertain what each desires from its housing. Next, I go beyond the traditional outcomes of homeownership and suburbanization. Since these outcomes are important markers of attainment, I do include them in my analysis, but immediately thereafter, they become predictors of more nuanced measures of residential attainment, including unit size, quality, and amenities, as well as neighborhood measures such as land use. Third, I include broader context, including housing market segment, regional location, and metropolitan area. Since conditions at each of these levels can influence the effect of race and nativity on the outcomes of individual households, adding these contexts helps determine the extent to which they affect individual residential outcomes of members of different racial and ethnic groups. Finally, I examine residential mobility to determine how (and whether) households are able to improve their living situations through a move. I examine shifts in tenure and housing type, as well as measures of relative satisfaction, to see how a move has shaped minorities’ residential attainment and, therefore, their attainment of the American Dream.