Race and Tenure in Toronto

Abstract

The analysis of a number of Toronto sub-populations consistently points to differences in the home-ownership rates between visible minorities and whites. People of African or Caribbean origin have a much lower chance of being home-owners compared to whites after controlling for differences in income levels, housing preferences and household characteristics. Differences in tenure profiles are reduced at higher income levels but the home-ownership deficit remains. Economic factors explain only a small part of the large difference. Cultural and institutional factors may determine how the tenure options are perceived and valued by different groups of people living in the same city. Biases in perceptions matter as they affect the extent to which people can gain from the direct and indirect subsidies offered to home-owners. The differences may be indicative of underlying problems some minorities face in gaining access to urban resources. Measures of home-ownership deficits among the black and Caribbean suggest the need for social policy that goes beyond income maintenance and housing subsidies groups to help equalise their social and economic opportunities.

Is gateway city clustering behind Canada's declining immigrant home‐ownership rates?

“…Firstly, most of the factors that might be expected to predict home-ownership under a basic life-cycle model do, pointing to a high level of concordance with other Canadian studies (Ray and Moore, 1991;Balakrishnan and Wu, 1992;Skaburskis, 1996;Haan, 2005a,b). Secondly, there are large and unexplained differences across visible minority groups in terms of access to home-ownership (which, although an important topic, is not further discussed here: see Haan (2007) for a more in-depth treatment).…”

“…Now, not only do many immigrants speak languages that are quite far removed etymologically and phonetically from English and/or French, but many are now also non-white (Badets and Chui, 1994). Although it is not the focus of this paper to compare rates across groups, or to assess the reasons behind any found differences, the sizeable body of literature on home-ownership differences across ethnic and/or visible minority groups (Ray and Moore, 1991;Balakrishnan and Wu, 1992;Murdie, 1994;Murdie et al, 1996;Skaburskis, 1996) should lead us to expect differences. Taken further, the declining home-ownership rates of the past 20 years could therefore be a function of aggregate changes in immigrant skin colour composition.…”

“…For the second equation (which is of greater interest for this study) there is also a fairly well-established tenure equation that can be used (Alba and Logan, 1992;Balakrishnan and Wu, 1992;Gyourko and Linneman, 1996;Skaburskis, 1996;Krivo and Kaufman, 2004;Haan, 2005b …”

Heterogeneity in Asian American Home-ownership: The Impact of Household Endowments and Immigrant Status

“…8 The use of this set of variables enables the researcher to capture factors that influence tenure choice based on the user cost of home-ownership and factors related to preferences of households correlated with demographic characteristics such as the life cycle (for example, Skaburskis, 1996). Instead of simply including household income, we include measures of permanent and transitory household income to capture nominal household affordability.…”

Conditions de logement des ménages immigrants et dynamiques métropolitaines à Montréal : une analyse multiniveau exploratoire

“…Dans le contexte canadien, ce sont les interprétations ethnoculturelles proches du courant béhavioriste qui ont été le plus régulièrement testées. Selon cette perspective, les variations des taux de propriété observées entre les différents groupes de la société seraient la conséquence de préférences culturelles distinctes par rapport à ce mode particulier d'occupation (Balakrishnan et Wu, 1992;Ray et Moore, 1991;Skaburskis, 1996). Cette position théorique a soulevé certaines objections.…”