The ultimate remittance
“Earth isn’t a place,” says Mayor John Amalfi, the hero of James Blish’s Blish’s multi-volume space epic Cities in Flight [One of our Ultimate Future Cities – Ed.], at the end of Earthman, Come Home. “It’s an idea.”
Homeownership is an idea, too, one whose powerful lure moves money and people across vast distances. As reported in this inspiring story from The Boston Globe on the ultimate remittance:
American dream goes global
More immigrants buying land in native countries
She was raised in a little wooden house with a thatched roof in the
Lying between
We have that in common; back in 1971 and 1972, I cleaned dorms at Harvard.
Corridors I have swept: Thayer Hall, Harvard Yard
But now Vinela Arias is preparing to return home in style. A few weeks ago, she and her boyfriend put a bid on a two-story stucco-ed colonial in an elite gated community in
One day, Arias hopes, she will never have to lift a mop again.
Gates community,
By moving to
For Arias and her boyfriend Ramon Quinonez , owning a home worth just over $100,000 - which will cost them roughly $1,000 a month - will mark a triumphant return to the Dominican Republic after years of sacrifice in the United States.
We read past a phrase like ‘years of sacrifice’ and taken it as a given, but I now realize it’s wrong. Ms. Arias didn’t sacrifice for her own future – rather, she made a big investment.
Arias, the youngest of seven children, followed five older siblings to the
Their sacrifices meant years apart from their families.
Except the ones who moved to the
Ms. Arias she gave up her Dominican community to move to a foreign land, but the lifestyle she led in
The money they sent home built their parents a new house and furnished it with comfortable chairs, a stove, and a microwave. And the money they still send back pays for doctors’ visits as their parents age.
In other words, there’s no doubt that Ms. Arias’s quality of life here in Boston was not only better than what she left behind, it was so much better she could provide for her parents.
As I posted in capital’s underground river, remittances are a huge source of capital flows to the developing world, including the tiny
The
As I put it a year ago:
Even as this debate is playing out, the other river is being actively primed by both US and Mexican capital markets, as highlighted in this Economist article:
ACROSS the Mexican countryside, villages are denuded of their working men but kept alive by their labour.
Increasingly we see communities of separated families, where geographical bachelors have migrated to the cities and the jobs, and their spouses, parents, and children stay behind. With capital mobile, labor too can be mobile, because it can send its capital home:
The northward exodus to
The Dominican’s population is 9.5 million; Mexico’s is 110 million. The Dominican, with a population 1/10th as large as
Quinonez graduated from college in the capital of
Both of them said they daydream about the house at work, though it will probably be at least a decade before they can live there permanently.
Homeownership is a dream that changes behavior.
Delta Intur, building affordable houses
They are buying the home through the Dominican group Delta Intur Corp., which held its first housing fair in
“It’s the kind of house I dreamed of,” said Arias, who arranges the furniture in her new home in her mind while riding the bus from her Roxbury neighborhood to work. “It’s mine.”
Commuting from apartment to dream
It is the American dream in reverse:
No, it’s the American Dream in export. It’s the human dream. People want to own their own homes. You are what you live in.
Arias is part of a growing contingent of immigrants who are gobbling up real estate in their native countries, discouraged by high housing prices and foreclosures in the United States [Please lose the cliches — those forces work in opposite directions – Ed.] and enticed by the possibility of returning home to a better life than the one they left behind.
Typical home in the Dominican.
Note rebar from the unfinished second floor of the adjacent house
If you can buy it, they will build, and they will build from the same cultural and demographic heritage as their target customers:
Developers from countries such as
In any locale where the home is a financial asset, homeownership is a form of savings with tangible byproducts. So anticipatory homeownership – savings in anticipation of borrowing and owning – is a form of behavioral improvement for the future. That’s a great thing.
“It’s something that’s growing,” said Romi Bhatia, vice president of international operations for the Microfinance International Corporation, a company based in Washington that makes financial services available to poor people in developing countries, including a plan this month to offer mortgages to Mexican immigrants in the United States. “There’s a huge untapped market,” he said.
Buying houses has always been part of the immigrant experience in the
One in twenty of immigrants, legal and illegal, are savings for a home ‘back home.’
From the New York Times: immigrant entrepreneurs
But Orozco said immigrants still face barriers to buying homes. Often, they cannot qualify for mortgages [in their home countries – Ed.] because they live in the
Many countries have under-developed housing finance ecosystems, which in turn inhibit the expansion of their physical housing and their national infrastructure.
In recent years, though, more real-estate developers, private lenders, and governments are making it easier for immigrants to buy homes directly, according to government officials and the Inter-American Development Bank in
Wise government works at the frontiers of bankability and affordability.
In
Su Casiia does excellent work; and proof of its success is that its parent company, Caja
In
A well-designed development program offers a range of prices, lot sizes, house sizes, and configurations.
The costs can be expensive in a country where the average income per capita is less than $6,000 a year, but affordable for immigrants who earn US wages.
“It’s all part of the market that we’re looking for - the Salvadoran people who live in the United States,” Luis Urrutia, manager of Constructora Universal, which owns Riverside Gardens, said in an interview from El Salvador. “They should have something they can be proud of.”
The companies are trying to attract immigrants with American-style amenities, including manicured lawns, 24-hour high-tech security, and prestige:
Ronald Espinal, 25, of
“I think about retiring, resting my body,” he said in a phone interview as pots and pans clanked in the background. “Here, you work all the time.”
Mr. Espinal is 25.
“That’s part of my goal, a better life for my family,” [Ms. Arial’s partner Ramon] Quinonez said. “I think about it, and it inspires me to keep fighting and working. I’ve acquired something - and I tell myself all this wasn’t in vain.”
Homeownership isn’t a place, it’s an idea.
“Our dream house,” by a Kibera savings cooperative
The American Dream, exported.
Take one back home
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