It was a time in the 1960s when Barbadians, indeed most West Indian immigrants, had hitched their stars to the American dream.
Acquisition of a house was at the top of the family agenda, a university education for adult family members and children and a shiny new car in the driveway were the other elements.
“I couldn’t get those things in Barbados, so I decided to come here,” said the elderly middle class Bajan. “Looking back on it I achieved most of those goals, the American dream, in a relatively short time.”
For example, he was able to buy a home on a tree-lined middle class street in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn for less than $30 000, putting down 10 per cent. He worked two jobs to meet the mortgage payment and the living expenses, all subsidized with his wife’s earnings. Today, that property is valued at almost US$1 million, he has finished paying off the mortgage, the children are educated and both mother and father are retired.
“I am holding onto this house. It belongs to the family,” he said a few days ago.
He is among the lucky ones who acquired property decades ago and didn’t take out equity loans to go on vacations to far-off lands or even to build a house in Barbados. Almost every day, a story is being told about West Indians caught up in the foreclosure crisis that’s sweeping America, two years after President Barack Obama moved into the White House and promised to kick-start the American economy.
“We are coming out of the recession rather slowly, but unemployment remains high and that means trouble for homeowners and those who rent apartments, including Caribbean immigrants,” said Dr Roy Hastick, president of the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Discuss this matter with Charles Small, a Bajan who is the chief clerk, the highest non-judicial officer in the civil division of the New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, and he would give you chapter and verse on the impact of the housing crisis.
“We have 15 000 foreclosure cases in Brooklyn now before the court,” said the attorney, who is a graduate of the Barbados Community College and the Brooklyn Law School.
Tom Waters, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York, also sees the damage which the crisis has had and is having on West Indians.
“The housing situation has adversely affected West Indians who sought to live out the American dream by owning their homes, instead of renting,” he told the WEEKEND NATION recently. “Home ownership is a priority for people from the Caribbean, but with unemployment so high people are losing their properties to foreclosure.”
The numbers speak for themselves. West Indians – Jamaicans, Guyanese, Trinidadians, Bajans, Antiguans, Haitians and others from the region – have a homeownership rate of 37 per cent among immigrants and 29 per cent for their second generation. That’s why the housing crisis is taking such a heavy toll.
But they aren’t alone. Bangladeshis, East Indians and Pakistanis in Queens are also crying out. At a recent forum arranged by the Community Service Society and the New York Immigration coalition, a community organization that caters to people from the Indian subcontinent told participants that hundreds, perhaps thousands of immigrants from that region of the world have either lost or are in danger of losing their homes in New York City.
That sketch fits in well with the national picture painted a few days ago by Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, who complained that foreclosures in some parts of the country have produced significant numbers of vacant properties which in turn have depressed home prices, attracted criminal elements and imposed additional financial burdens for local governments.
The upshot, in New York City’s case, is that West Indians, for instance, have been hit with a triple whammy, even if their own homes have not been acquired from under them by the holder of the mortgage.
The US Census Bureau reported last week that the national homeownership rate fell to 66.4 per cent in the first quarter of the year, the lowest level in at least a dozen years.
But how do Bajans and others from the Caribbean feel about the state of the US economy, which has forced many of them to rethink the American dream? Their assessments fall in line with current thinking among Americans. A new Gallup poll found that 55 per cent of Americans believe the US is currently in a recession or a depression.
It’s an obvious case of an American housing dream becoming a nightmare.