From today's Post-Gazette (via the Wall Street Journal), an article about how manufacturers of pre-fab homes seemed to have found their target market: recent Latino immigrants looking to get out of the apartment complex rut and into a safe, decent environment where they can own their own homes. An excerpt:
Susana Galindo was tired of the booming music, the beer-soaked parties and the leering neighbors who used to watch her when she left her trailer-type home for her job at a produce store. The young, single woman from Mexico wanted out.
One day, she saw a brightly colored sign on the side of a road in suburban Atlanta advertising a different kind of complex in a nicer neighborhood. The sign was in Spanish, which was handy as Ms. Galindo speaks limited English. Almost immediately, she became hooked on a two-bedroom unit. "It's clean," she says through an interpreter. "There're no more people hanging out, drinking."
The company offering Galindo her dream is going after others like her because, according to them:
Hispanics tend to have reliable payment habits, are interested in maintaining nice communities and "tend to do business by word of mouth," thus pulling other family members and friends into the parks.
I have to question whether this is the best housing choice for a low-income immigrant family. The article says:
Residents don't own the land underneath the house, and yet unlike an old-style trailer, it can't easily be moved to a new location. "They have very limited prospects for building wealth if they don't control the land, and they can easily be displaced," says George McCarthy of the Ford Foundation, which is working to improve the financial situation of manufactured-home owners.
Add to that inexperience with credit and loans, zero equity, uncertainty about terms and a house that will not stand the test of time, and this adds up to less than the American dream. Might these companies just be taking advantage of inexperienced first-time Latino homebuyers? Let's hope not.
I cannot help but compare what I read here to that heartwrenching scene in Upton Sinclair's the Jungle, when Jurgis, the head of an Eastern European family trying to make it in Chicago comes home only to find that the pre-fabricated home he spent his family's entire savings on no longer belonged to them. They had read the sign in their language, too. They had been encouraged by fellow immigrants as well. And they had been duped. Maybe a stretch to compare, but these sad stories sometimes repeat themselves.
That was 1906. I leave you with that old immigrant story to help us ponder the new.
Their home! Their home! They had lost it! Grief, despair, rage, overwhelmed him – what was any imagination of the thing to this heartbreaking, crushing reality of it – to the sight of strange people living in his house, hanging their curtains to his windows, staring at him with hostile eyes! It was monstrous, it was unthinkable – they could not do it – it could not be true! Only think what he had suffered for that house – what miseries they had all suffered for it – the price they had paid for it!
The whole long agony came back to him. Their sacrifices in the beginning, their three hundred dollars that they had scraped together, all they owned in the world, all that stood between them and starvation! And then their toil, month by month, to get together the twelve dollars, and the interest as well, and now and then the taxes, and the other charges, and the repairs, and what not! Why, they had put their very souls into their payments on that house, they had paid for it with their sweat and tears – yes, more, with their very lifeblood.
Technorati tags: immigration, latino marketing, hispanic marketing, spanish, housing
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