Foreign Flavors: Developers targeting immigrant home buyers need to rethink the features and amenities they offer.
By Lori Johnston
Open floor plans, private backyards, large garages—such features often wow many American-born buyers. Those same amenities, however, can turn away their foreign-born counterparts.
As the immigrant population in the United States continues to grow, developers and builders are recognizing that Latino, Asian, and other foreign-born buyers demand different floor plans and features. Today, the immigrant population represents 37.5 million residents, or 12.4 percent of the U.S. population, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. And these immigrants are buying homes: Nearly 20 percent of new home loans in 2006 were awarded to Asian-American and Hispanic buyers, according to the 2007 Annual Minority Lending Report compiled by Compliance Technologies and Genworth Financial.
Still, reaching out to the immigrant population requires more than translating a few signs into their native language; it means appealing to their traditions and views of homeownership, says developer and builder Fernando Pagés, author of books such as Aff ordable Remodel (Taunton, October 2007).
“Just as food and clothing are different in other parts of the world, architectural preferences are, too,” he says. “Their traditional stock [building] plan may not appeal to and/or respond to the lifestyle needs of their target market.” Flags of Our Fathers: Developers of Liberty Village make residents comfortable by fl ying flags indicating their countries of origin.
EYEING THE GROWTH
Understanding the demands on residential developments today requires studying the shifts in immigrant populations of the past. Consider that today’s urban areas boast their largest immigrant populations ever. And those populations are no longer contained to the coasts. “There’s a whole new set of up-and-coming, 21st century gateways,” says Audrey Singer, senior fellow at Washington, D.C.-based The Brookings Institution, who has analyzed Census figures on immigrants.
Singer says emerging spots for immigrants include Atlanta, Dallas/Fort Worth, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C.—cities that are growing faster than those traditionally attracting immigrants in the early 1900s and through World War II. Washington, D.C., for instance, has more than 1 million immigrants—nearly as many as Houston or San Francisco—according to Singer’s research. And more immigrants (approximately 612,000) live in Atlanta than in Long Island, Philadelphia, or Detroit.
What’s more, there has been an overall rise in the number of immigrants living outside central cities, making suburbs more diverse than ever, Singer adds. In Atlanta and Washington, D.C., more than 90 percent of foreign-born residentslive in the suburbs, compared to 59 percent in Chicago and 49 percent in San Francisco. By 2006, 50 percent of the country’s 37.5 million immigrants lived in the suburbs of the 100 largest metropolitan areas; in 1980, 44 percent of the country’s 14 million foreign-born residents lived in outlying cities.
Now, these demographic trends are seeping into community design. “We find a whole new set of needs [and constraints] for immigrants that have to do with housing and transportation and everything that goes with the suburbs,” Singer says.
Among the concerns: sprawl. Singer says many suburban communities with immigrant newcomers are overcrowded, leading some municipalities to try and control immigrant numbers.
Counties, cities, and neighborhoods also face an aesthetic dilemma. For instance, homes may need to be built for larger families, Singer says. Immigrants from China and India often have family members who take expensive trips to the United States and then stay in the country for long periods. As a result, developers must rethink the size, layout, and confi guration of their homes and neighborhoods in order to appeal to these buyers.
Still, many developers are wary of making homes that fit the needs of a single group. They don’t want to limit their marketing efforts to those buyers.
NEEDS OF THEIR OWN
Pagés, for one, has noticed a growth in builders and developers who are making subtle design changes in order to lure immigrant buyers. Pagés first turned his attention toward immigrant buyers in themid ’80s when developing in Los Angeles’ Mexican neighborhoods. “Our buyers would move in and start to remodel almost immediately,” he says.
Among the changes they made: adding walls to separate the kitchen and living area or turning garages into entertainment spaces. Why those rooms? Latino families often gather in the front yard so they can feel connected to their community, says Teresa Brice, executive director of the Phoenix, Ariz., office of Local Initiatives Support Corp. (LISC), a community-based development organization working to transform distressed communities.
Pagés decided to revamp his building plans, adding a portico to the garage and upgrading its features such as flooring and countertops. He is employing similar efforts in communities such as Liberty Village in Lincoln, Neb., a development of 20 single-family homes and four townhomes that were priced in the low $100,000s and completed in 2006. The project’s buyers come from 16 countries— Vietnamese immigrants represent the largest group of residents.
Through interviews, Pagés determined the features that would make or break a sale at Liberty Village. His findings: First, the style and layout of the homes needed to correlate with the residents’ traditions in their native countries. Take the Vietnamese buyers. All of them wanted outdoor, vented range hoods, so one option Pagés made available was garage kitchens. The adjustments didn’t stop there. To appeal to Muslims, Pagés and his team chose to position toilets facing away from Mecca. Hispanic buyers seemed to prefer having an extra bathroom in the hallway that all family members could share in lieu of having a master bathroom. And the Korean buyers responded to feng shui influences, such as turning stairways so they don’t point toward the front door.
Other projects are doing similar things. Tarragon Development Corp. hired a feng shui consultant for its Trio project, a condominium development in Palisades Park, N.J., with 140 units in two nine-story buildings priced from the $300,000s and up. The consultant recommended skipping the fourth floor, since four is a number that should be avoided. A majority of the owners today are Korean. “By doing it, we captured more buyers. If we had not done it, we would have lost buyers,” says William Rosato, president of New York City-based Tarragon.
Still, developers can’t ignore the technical aspect of targeting immigrant buyers, says Brice of LISC. Consider Latino and other immigrant families, for whom the idea of a household may need to be redefined to take into account financial and cultural perspectives. For instance, many immigrant households “literally [believe] ‘Mi casa, su casa,’” she adds.
What’s more, these immigrant buyers may drive the continued rise in mixed- use, transit-oriented, New Urbanist developments. “If you want smart growth to work, if you want walkable communities, if you want those New Urbanist neighborhoods to act as they’re supposed to,” Pagés says, “you need to fill them with immigrants.”
