The Guru Is In
Turning refugees into Americans
By David A. Smith
5 min read
If the world’s 60 million refugees were a nation, they would be the world’s 23rd largest, with more people than South Africa or Italy. All of them have lost their homes, and all of them desperately want a home – in fact, not just a home, but a secure and stable place from which they can build new lives. While many may feel emotionally that ‘home’ is where they came from, most know that to build a new life they must migrate somewhere – within their country or to a new country.
Those who move migrate from failed or failing places to more successful ones, and among the people I’ve encountered in emerging nations worldwide, via my work at the Affordable Housing Institute, the gold standard is America. Aside from the migrants’ desires, as I’ve written elsewhere no nation on earth is more ready to let immigrants become citizens than the US, it is embedded into our cultural DNA that we want to enable worthy immigrants to come, if in coming they will become Americans.
But what makes an immigrant ‘become American,’ how does the way we as Americans respond to the newcomers influence whether they rise or fall, and where does this intersect with affordable housing?
Ever since the Irish potato famine a century and a half ago, waves of immigrants displaced by some disaster at home have streamed into the United States. In the main, each wave brought people who were asset-poor, culturally unfamiliar with America, often challenged by language or other barriers, and in desperate need of orientation and embrace. The result, was in most cases, the emergence of ethnic neighborhoods within the larger landing cities (Boston, New York, San Francisco) and industrial job-creating interior ones (Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis), and today those same cities proudly celebrate their Chinatowns and Little Italy’s.
Refugee immigrants gravitate to the cities for four things: income, housing, schooling, and exposure to American language and culture. For many of them, income comes from entrepreneurship – the same ambition and self-motivation that brought them here drives them to find work that pays, and for many that means entrepreneurship. These may be service-based, such as hotel maids or taxi/Uber drivers, or small-asset businesses, such as food trucks or plumbing/masonry contractors, or larger enterprises, like grocery stores or nail/hair salons. Usually they employ the whole family, which lives nearby or, in an ideal case, upstairs. And out of any of these professions comes a further by-product – facility in English, which often flows upward from the children to their parents, because children can consume a new language like ice cream.
Affordable urban housing should be the cornerstone of this resettlement strategy; without housing there can be no family stability, no chance for children’s education, no security to create recurring income.
Without good housing, instead of becoming Americans, refugees can take another path, one into idleness, isolation, and bitterness. Put them in a holding pen – whether it is a ‘camp’ or a trailer or a decrepit concrete high-rise – that is spatially and spiritually isolated from the rest of the city and they fall into themselves, becoming effectively stateless. The Brussels bombers came from Molenbeek, an enclave two decades in the making; the 2005 Paris rioters from Clichy-sous-Bois, a location not served by any highway, major road, or rail/Metro lines, and thus the city’s most isolated, crime-ridden, and depressing ‘suburb’ (banlieue).
If affordable housing has a major influence on whether immigrants become Americans or stateless interlopers, the housing they need usually isn’t the typologies we have designed for US citizens. Few immigrant families could run our eligibility and application gauntlet for LIHTC, public housing, or elderly housing, and even if they were somehow eligible, it is not as though we have such apartments begging for lack of American demand. The people we want to become Americans want to be economically productive, they want to become homeowners if they can and if not for their children to become homeowners, and we want them to be so motivated. That means we need to develop, pilot, incentivize, and scale new housing typologies such as:
- Owner-occupied commercial. A property that is revenue-producing on the ground floor and residential on the floor(s) above, where both the occupancy value and the potential commercial value can be underwritten and then financed.
- Small-owner-occupied landlord. The triple-decker or six-flat where the owner family lives in one of the apartments, renovates and rents the others.
- Foreclosure urban homesteading. The family buys a foreclosed home in a wobbly neighborhood from the bank that doesn’t know what to do with it, and with a combination of home improvement loan and sweat equity, stabilizes and improves it.
Government will not design these programs; we have to design them because we know how, and then give away the designs for free, as open-source franchise, for the good of our country.
Fifty, 100, and 150 years ago, prior waves of immigrants (my family’s forbearers, perhaps yours too) moved into just such properties as these, transforming them into today’s vibrant ethnic neighborhoods; some neighborhoods even cycled through multiple waves of immigrants, a hand-me-down landing-pad into America.
Chinatown or Molenbeek? The answer depends on housing. The housing depends, not on the LIHTC, but on us.
