Exploring the intra-immigrant homeownership gap in Norway: The role of cultural attachment

In most Western countries, the foreign-born households as a group lag behind the native-born in terms of homeownership rates and often also in terms of housing quality and crowding (Krivo, 1995; Myers and Lee, 1996; Drever and Clark, 2002). A substantial amount of research has been devoted to explaining the immigrant-native housing gap. Much of the research investigating the explanatory factors behind the homeownership gap has been focused on the US, where the gap in homeownership attainment between households headed by a native born compared to a foreign-born person increased from 15 percentage points in 1990 to 20 percentage points in 2000 (Borjas, 2002). A common result in the literature is that differences in economic and demographic factors explain part of the homeownership gap, and the more detailed the available information, the higher the share of the gap explained. However, in general differences in observables fail to fully explain the housing gap between immigrant and native born households. The topic of within-group differences has been less highlighted in the research on immigrant housing attainment. The immigrant population is composed of diverse subgroups that differ substantially amongst themselves and may in fact resemble each other far less than they resemble the native-born population. Grouping immigrants together in one large group may therefore murk any existing differences with regards to barriers to homeownership and also make it more difficult to gauge the distribution of benefit from any policy initiative to increase homeownership rates.

Publication Date: 
2011