Rent Burdened in Nashville: An Analysis of Foreign-Born in Nashville MSA, Tennessee

Keywords: Foreign born Not Citizens, Nashville, Knoxville, Rent burden index
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Owning a home has increasingly become difficult since the recession of 2007-2009 wherein too many households lost their ability to own homes due to the bubble burst. With the numbers of households reaching an all-time high at 43 million by 2016, the recession-induced increased demands for rentals caused historical shortages of vacant homes and housing supply, further aggravating the overall costs in home prices and as well as rental costs. While this phenomenon is nothing new for most Americans, housing insecurity and rent burden have remained a major problem for people of color across the U.S., and more so in the Nuevo-southern metropolises that have attracted immigrants over last two decades. Despite the wide gamut of housing scholarship, the empirical addressing of rent burden, especially the foreign-born-non-citizens (FBNC) is lacking. This paper explores the relationships between rent burden among minorities, especially the FBNC in the MSA of Nashville, Tennessee which has grown not only because of its economy, but also because of educational institutes which has continued to attract younger/children-of-immigrants. Nashville is also a college-township, which obviously ahs advantages compared to Knoxville--smaller MSA. By using a newly calibrated rent burden index (RBI)—previously applied at metropolitan-scale—scaled to census-tracts, we regress it against a select group of demographic, socio-economic and built-environment attributes to identify the predictors. The tracts closer to the education-centers, over-represented by college-aged cohort, face the highest rent burdens. These tracts have over-representation of immigrants/FBNC. Tracts with newer housing stock are less burdened, indicating its significance in lowering rent burden.