Finding a Home Inside the Golden Door

By Dennis Hevesi

Beaming with pride of ownership, Jose and Paula Lora stood before their dark-red, split-level home in Teaneck, N.J., last weekend, a long way from the city of Santiago in the Dominican Republic and -- if not geographically, at least in their minds -- nearly as far from the cramped Bronx rental apartments in which they had lived since arriving in the United States a decade ago.

The house cost $170,000 and, after several years of saving, the Loras managed to make a down payment of $25,000. ''It has four bedrooms, a study and a small basement for the kids to watch TV,'' Mr. Lora said, ''you know, to do the mess, the games, the toys.'' Jorge is 9, and Ruth is 8.

The Loras occupy one band on the spectrum of experience faced by immigrants in dealing with the intricacies of real estate in the New York area.

In a three-story walk-up on Orchard Street in Manhattan's Chinatown, a 37-year-old man from China's Fujian province hides his face behind a newspaper. His name is Mr. Liu; he did not want to give his full name. Mr. Liu occupies a far distant band on the spectrum.

He is one of eight men who share a 12- by 12-foot space, sleeping on slapdash, raw-lumber bunk beds. Together, the eight men pay $640 a month for the room, as do eight men living in each of the two other rooms in the same apartment -- all sharing the filth-encrusted bathroom and kitchen. There are about 70 people living in the building's three apartments.

Mr. Liu has lived there six of his 10 years in America. ''Not used to it,'' he said through an interpreter, ''but what can I do?''

For all sorts of reasons -- both imposed and, to a degree, self-imposed -- some immigrants succeed in their quest for decent housing in and around New York City, some don't.

In effect, the tens of thousands of newcomers -- and their numbers are increasing -- must navigate a nuanced web of factors in finding a home: the language barrier, jarring cultural differences, the complexity of the rental and mortgage-acquisition systems, lack of credit histories, lack of banking services in their communities, incomes off the books, the driving urge for family reunification, loyalty to two countries, sending money home, being treated as intruders, racial discrimination and being cheated -- sometimes, even, by their own countrymen.

Through all that, more and more new Americans -- like the Loras -- make it.

In 1996 (the last year for which data were available), according to the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, 37.7 percent, or 1,048,000, of the 2,780,000 households in the city were headed by immigrants. That represented an increase from 1991, when 33.2 percent, or 924,600, of all households were headed by immigrants. And over the same period, the number of immigrants who purchased homes increased from 257,000 to 276,000, so that, as of 1996, 26.3 percent of all immigrants in the city were home owners.

There are no numbers to gauge the impact of immigration on the city's suburbs. But one hint is that the Loras now belong to the year-old, dozen-member Dominican Home Owners Association of Bergen County, N.J. ''We were living in the Bronx, near Lehman College,'' Mr. Lora said. ''Our rent was $550. It went to like $650. Then we moved, and we paid there $720 -- the last rent we paid.''

Like so many other tenants, Mr. Lora -- who in 10 years here has worked his way from restaurant cashier to accountant -- did the math and wondered: Why pay someone else? That was four years ago.

Not that it was easy securing a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 8.5 percent. ''At the beginning, they made life impossible,'' Mr. Lora said of the lender. ''We dealt with the mortgage company for five months.''

Asked if he thought he was being discriminated against, Mr. Lora said, ''I don't think it was that.''

''It was the first time we bought a house,'' he said. ''We didn't know how. At one point you think maybe because you are Mr. Lora, not Mr. Johnson, that they are making life impossible to give you the loan. Now that I know the process, I would know if they are trying to bother me or if they just need to know.''

For lack of understanding of the system, Mr. Lora said, many immigrants ''don't have the documentation together.''

''They think the person they tried to get the loan from is trying to take advantage,'' he said. ''I don't say that doesn't happen, but sometimes it's misunderstanding.''

Or utter unfamiliarity.

''There is no tradition of mortgages in India,'' said Vanitha Venugopal, housing director in the office of Queens Borough President Claire Shulman -- a point made by representatives of other ethnic groups.

''We come from a cash-based economy,'' said Hugh Hamilton, a Guyanese native, speaking about members of the Caribbean community. ''Most Caribbeans are unaware of the criteria that must be met in order to qualify for mortgages.'' Mr. Hamilton is legislative director for City Councilman Lloyd Henry, a Brooklyn Democrat.

In November, during a conference on immigrant housing at the New York University School of Law, one participant raised his hand to say, ''When Latin American immigrants see 30-year mortgages, we get scared and limit ourselves to short-term loans'' -- sometimes from unscrupulous lenders who, knowing that the buyer knows no better, charge exorbitant rates. Sometimes the real estate agent and the mortgage broker are in cahoots, and the guileless buyer appreciates what seems like one-stop shopping. Victor Morisete-Romero, executive director of the Community Association of Progressive Dominicans, a social service agency, said immigrants often pay 24 percent over a seven-year term.

Cultural norms ''often clash with the American-dream mentality,'' he said. ''In the Dominican Republic, when you buy a home the deal is done; there aren't additional expenses. Here, with taxes, water bills, fire inspections, boiler inspections, building regulations, amortizing the mortgage, they look at a $140,000 investment for 30 years at 7.65 percent, do the numbers and basically say they don't really own it.''

That is, if they have got that far in the mortgage-buying process -- no mean feat for most immigrants.

Some newcomers, particularly professionals and established business people, arrive in the United States with considerable wealth, education, connections and access to the system.

Others, arriving for the raft of reasons that have impelled immigration to America for generations -- political, religious, racial persecution; yearnings for a better life, hopes of easing the economic burden of those in the old country -- come ill-equipped to deal with real estate. The difficulties are compounded, of course, if the immigrant is here illegally.

''There is no such thing back home as rent regulation,'' said Ms. Venugopal. ''So, at least for the first few years, they may live in terrible conditions because they are unaware of the protections available to them.''

A participant at the N.Y.U. conference, which was sponsored by the law school's Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, said that besides being unaware of the rental protections, many immigrants avoid filing a complaint, fearing that an appearance in Housing Court will leave them with a police record.

Christopher Kui, executive director of Asian Americans for Equality, a nonprofit community and housing development organization, pointed out that just as immigrant renters are unaware of their rights, ''some Chinese landlords are ignorant of their responsibilities under the law, so housing codes are not enforced.''

At the same time, Mr. Kui said, Chinese immigrants ''often buy houses with basements to rent them, only to find that it is against the law, after they have calculated mortgage payments based on that income.''

Many new arrivals must, of course, take menial jobs in factories or restaurants, where they are paid off the books, rendering it impossible to start building the credit histories indispensable for eventually working their way up the rental ladder and, perhaps, purchasing their slice of the proverbial American pie.

To save, they live together -- extended families and strangers alike -- doubling and tripling up, or crammed like Mr. Liu into barracks-like hovels. ''I want to buy a house or rent a house,'' he said, ''but not without my family.''

Mr. Liu fled from the Chinese population police in 1986. ''Because I have five children, the government gave me trouble,'' he said. ''Before I got arrested, I went away.'' He has seen his family once in 10 years.

''I save to bring them here,'' he said.

Poorer immigrants forgo buying a car, going to the movies, medical insurance. Accustomed to all-cash economies, many keep their savings at home, exposing themselves to further risk. To pay the rent, they go to the Post Office and buy a money order.

Erika Rodas, assistant coordinator of minority lending in the Westbury, L.I., office of the Skyscraper Mortgage Company, told the tale of a Salvadoran couple with three children who kept $7,000 under a mattress in the dilapidated one-bedroom apartment for which they were paying monthly rent of $1,400. Ms. Rodas said the father, a pizza cook, could not read; the mother worked in a factory. They dreamed of a decent home.

''We prequalified them to see how much they could really afford for a house,'' Ms. Rodas said. ''We took them to open a bank account. We finally found the house they needed -- a cape, four bedrooms, in a much better area of Westbury.''

The house, appraised at $140,000, was facing foreclosure, Ms. Rodas said, ''so they got it for $90,000 and they have a lot of equity now.'' The 30-year mortgage had a fixed rate of 8 percent.

Three months after the family moved out, fire gutted their old apartment house. ''They were very grateful,'' Ms. Rodas said. ''They would have lost their savings.''

The immigrant housing quest can come up against ''cultural quirks'' -- Ms. Venugopal's phrase -- that sometimes act like ruts in the road, sometimes smooth the way and even on occasion profoundly change the communities in which the newcomers settle.

Some immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are adherents to Vastu Shastra -- a code, similar to Chinese Feng Shui, that guides one toward the most spiritually propitious way of laying out a home.

''I know one person who told a realtor he wanted the master bedroom facing east, so the morning sun will wake him,'' Ms. Venugopal said.

At the N.Y.U. conference, a man from Nigeria said that in his country most people live in inherited houses, or build their own, so buying someone else's home is a foreign concept.

Many ethnic groups, denied access to banking services, form networks of relatives and friends -- buyers' clubs, in effect -- to exchange information and pool their resources. Mr. Hamilton, the native of Guyana who is now a city official, said that in Caribbean communities such a network is called a ''sou-sou'' -- an informal system of rotating credit based on African tradition.

''Let's say six of us decide to set aside $200 every month,'' Mr. Hamilton said. ''It would take six months for any one of us to get $1,200, but by pooling our contributions, each person is able to get $1,200 from any single pool.'' The contributors pick the order of beneficiaries. ''In terms of buying a house, of course, you multiply it significantly, involving as many people as necessary.''

The language barrier can literally change the face of the city.

It may be apocryphal but, by some accounts, Sunset Park in Brooklyn became a haven for Chinese immigrants after several settled there and put the word out: get off at the Blue Sky Station -- the BMT stop after the train comes out of the tunnel. ''It illustrates the barriers people face when they can't read signs,'' said Mr. Kui of Asian Americans for Equality.

The No. 7 line from Flushing to Times Square is known by some as the New Orient Express.

AND in the 1970's, immigrants from Odessa, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, chose to settle in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, because, like Odessa, it is by the sea -- sowing seeds for the still-blossoming Russian enclave in southern Brooklyn.

Among the more recent buds are Ilya and Inessa Rubenstein and their 4-year-old son, Samuel. The Rubensteins were fortunate: someone told them to start building credit soon after they arrived from the former Soviet republic of Belarus in 1993.

Mr. Rubenstein had worked for a Jewish organization in the city of Minsk. And when the collapse of Communism released pent-up right-wing extremism, he said, ''it was, of course, anti-Semitic.''

''Sometimes,'' he said, ''we had letters that Jews should go back where they came from, threatening phone calls and many things that forced us to leave.''

Relatives of Mrs. Rubenstein had already fled to the United States. ''And the minute we came,'' Mr. Rubenstein said, ''they told us to start our credit history. So I got credit cards almost immediately.''

Six years later, the Rubensteins -- he now the administrative director of the Jewish Community Council of Kings Bay in Brooklyn, she working toward a degree in medical technology -- have passed muster with the co-op board of Sheepshead Bay Terrace, a 168-unit building, and are awaiting final approval of their mortgage from Chase Manhattan to buy a $45,000, two-bedroom apartment.

They are part of the burgeoning middle class of immigrants moving toward home-buying that developers like Joshua Muss, president of Muss Development -- a company that has built 20,000 housing units in the city since 1906 -- are tapping into.

''We're talking about probably a million immigrants who have come within the last decade,'' Mr. Muss said. ''Many are improving themselves and aspiring to better housing, and there's nothing available.''

After several Soviet emigres bought $200,000 to $300,000 houses at Captain's Quarters, a 270-unit Muss development in the Princes Bay section of Staten Island, ''there was word of mouth and we started advertising, targeting them in Russian newspapers in Brooklyn,'' Mr. Muss said. ''And of the last 100 homes, half went to former Soviet emigres.''

Within months, he said, his company will begin construction of an 850-unit complex on the site of the old Brighton Beach Baths. And the company is considering construction of 1,200 units on a 100-acre expanse of downtown Flushing recently rezoned by the City Planning Commission. ''The market there is enormous,'' Mr. Muss said, ''a huge community of Korean, Chinese and Indian immigrants, very anxious for housing.''

Immigrants are vital to the city's housing health, said Michael Schill, director of the N.Y.U. real estate center. ''They maintain the city's population.''

Between 1990 and 1997, according to Census Bureau estimates, the city's population increased modestly, by 0.3 percent, or about 20,000 people. And while the city experienced a net loss of 1,073,500 people to other parts of the country during that period, the city gained 677,200 people through immigration and 421,200 more by natural increase -- meaning more births than deaths. ''So without immigration,'' Professor Schill said, ''the city would have lost 9 percent of its population.''

''That would have had a tremendous effect on the city's economy, its retail, the labor force and its neighborhoods,'' he said.

On one hand, immigration tightens the housing market and contributes to higher rents for all New Yorkers, Professor Schill said. But without it, he said, rents at the bottom of the market would be insufficient to enable owners to maintain buildings, ''which would lead to disinvestment, tax delinquencies and, ultimately, abandonment.''

''So, while immigration is a mixed blessing,'' he said, ''in my view it is ultimately a positive because without it neighborhoods would be scarred by vacant and deteriorating housing.''

Naomi Bayer is director of the New York office of Fannie Mae, the federally chartered funding source for issuers of mortgages. ''Much of our work is aimed at breaking down barriers and providing the information immigrants need,'' Ms. Bayer said. In cooperation with the Queens Borough Public Library system, Fannie Mae has started a series of home-buying workshops in a variety of languages. It has adopted policies allowing lenders to use alternate forms of credit -- rent stubs, phone bills -- as parts of a buyer's credit record, and to accept ''sou-sous'' as an alternate down payment source.

It has also created low down payment products -- 3 percent for single-unit properties, 5 percent for a two-family and 10 percent for a three- or four-family home. And it has adopted a formula for two- to four-unit properties in which rental income can count far more significantly than in the past in allowing a lower-income family to afford a mortgage.

FRANK AND JENNY GAO are about to join the ranks of American home owners. Newly arrived from China in 1990, the Gaos first lived with relatives in Newport News, Va., then moved to a rental in Philadelphia, then doubled up with strangers in Flushing -- the ''new Chinatown,'' Mr. Gao called it -- then moved into a second-floor bedroom in another Flushing home, sharing the kitchen and bathrooms with the owner.

''My landlord had a baby,'' said Mr. Gao, a shipping clerk for an import company, ''so I need to get a new place.'' The Gaos took a homebuyers workshop from Asian Americans for Equality. Then, it all seemed so foreign. ''In China, we don't need to buy,'' Mr. Gao said. ''Government gave me the apartment; just pay like $3, a few peanuts.''

At the buyer's workshop, ''they taught me the difference between buying an apartment or a house, a condominium and co-op -- condominium you own the space, co-op just share the stock,'' Mr. Gao said proudly. ''They say for a mortgage we need to pay no more than 30 percent of the expenses every month. They told me to save in the bank, and put in every month.'' On Wednesday, the Gaos will close on a two-bedroom, $50,000 co-op in Briarwood, Queens, with a 30-year mortgage at a fixed rate of 6.875 percent.

''I want privacy,'' Mr. Gao said. ''I want space. I have lots of books.''

The apartment is on the seventh floor, with a westward view. ''I like this place,'' Mr. Gao said. ''It's very beautiful from the living room. I can look at the Manhattan skyline.''