Cityscape: Volume 23 Number 2 | The Hispanic Housing Experience in the United States

Cityscape Symposium on the Hispanic Housing Experience in the United States: An Introduction

Rocio Sanchez-Moyano
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Eileen Díaz McConnell
Arizona State University

The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or the Federal Reserve System.

Hispanics made up 18 percent of the total U.S. population and numbered nearly 61 million people in 2019 (Noe-Bustamante, Lopez, and Krogstad, 2020). This large and diverse population is growing at a faster rate than non-Hispanic Whites (hereafter, Whites) and African-Americans but more slowly than the nation’s most rapidly growing group, Asians (Noe-Bustamante, Lopez, and Krogstad, 2020). Often, the housing experiences of Hispanics are examined in combination with those of other populations, either as a description of the immigrant experience relative to non-Hispanic White natives, paired with Asian households, or compared with the racialized experience of African-Americans in discussions of segregation and discrimination in housing markets. In these cases, Hispanics tend to be “in the middle”—less racialized than Black households but not as socioeconomically mobile as Asian ones. However, Hispanics are not a perfect comparison to either group. Although many are recent immigrants, nearly two-thirds are U.S.-born, constituting the second, third, or sixth generation or more of their family to live in the United States (Noe-Bustamante and Flores, 2019). At the same time, the scale of Mexican and other Latin American migration to the United States in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st also means that the immigrant context cannot be ignored.