[Mind the Gap] Homeownership: ‘I made it in America!’

“I don’t want to drive housing prices down,” US President Donald Trump said during a January 29 Cabinet meeting. “I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes.”

For Filipino Americans who maintain one of the highest homeownership rates among Asian subgroups, often reported as high as 67% for immigrant-headed Filipino households, this political stance is music to their ears.

Even more so to those who’ve reached the free and clear milestone: nearly 45% of established Filipino American homeowners now own their houses outright, with no mortgage at all. 

The scale of this wealth is staggering. Because so many families concentrated in expensive coastal hubs like California, Hawaii, and New Jersey, their equity has exploded alongside the markets. Various estimates show Filipino American homeowners now hold upwards of $400 billion in tappable equity. 

For a Filipino couple who bought a modest home in Daly City or Cerritos in the 1990s for $250,000,  they now sit on an asset worth $1.5 million. Many are now leveraging their homes to fund nursing degrees, start businesses, and provide the early inheritances that allow their children to put up the down payment in a hyper-expensive market.

“I want to protect the people who, for the first time in their lives, feel good about themselves. They feel like, you know, that they’re wealthy people,” Trump emphasized.

Piece of the American pie

For Filipino immigrants, owning a home is the clearest declaration that the journey worked: “I made it in America!”

Buying a house isn’t merely a real estate transaction; it is a liturgical act of arrival, of finally owning a piece of the American Dream. 

If the Certificate of Naturalization is the “Holy Grail,” homeownership is the altar where immigrant prayers finally find a home.

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But while we celebrate our homes becoming growth stocks, younger families — including our own children — have fewer and fewer places to go.

By 2025, the downpayment alone for a median-priced home in much of California could top $200,000 – more than the full price of a starter family home in the 1990s. Even if you have the income for monthly payments, if you don’t have that lump sum, you can’t buy.

That’s why parents helping with down payments or two high earners becomes essential, like two registered nurses working 12-hour shifts with a combined income upwards of $250,000.

Others are leaning into the “bayanihan” spirit by necessity, with roughly 26% of Filipino households living in multigenerational arrangements — the highest rate among all Asian groups — pooling incomes just to secure a mortgage.  

Meanwhile, those without family property wealth face a harsher reality: longer commutes, overcrowded rentals, or leaving the communities where they grew up. 

Rents in many of the same metro areas where Filipino families put down roots have climbed far faster than wages. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that half of US renters now spend more than 30% of their income on housing, the highest level on record. 

For young adults, the fallback is often moving back home. According to the Pew Research Center, the share of Americans ages 18 to 29 living with one or both parents remains near historic highs, driven largely by housing costs. What used to be a short stop between school and independence has become a prolonged economic holding pattern.

At the extreme end of this squeeze is something impossible to ignore: rising homelessness in the same high-cost regions where housing wealth has soared. 

‘Not In My Backyard’ policies

For decades, local politics across the country have been shaped by Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) policies. Homeowners resist apartments, townhomes, or backyard units out of fear they will change neighborhood character or hurt property values. 

“Existing housing, people that own their homes, we’re going to keep them wealthy,” Trump said. “We’re going to keep those prices up. We’re not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody who didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”

Everyone wants to protect their neighborhood. Everyone wants their house prices to keep going up. But when every block says no, we end up with exactly what we see now: sky-high prices, record rents, and homelessness growing in the same places where housing wealth exploded.

Allowing more housing — duplexes, accessory dwelling units, small multifamily buildings near transit — does not erase neighborhoods. 

It can mean your daughter doesn’t have to move two hours away. It can mean your son doesn’t have to choose between roommates at 35 or relocate to cheaper, distant states. It can mean fewer people pushed into cars, shelters, and sidewalks because there simply aren’t enough homes. 

This is the conundrum Filipino American homeowners now face. The American Dream worked — spectacularly — for one generation. But its success helped make entry harder for the next.

Home equity has been the Filipino community’s most reliable ladder upward. It funded education, entrepreneurship, and stability. The challenge now is making sure we don’t pull that ladder up behind us. 

We came so the next generation could build lives here too — near us, not far away, and not locked out of the very neighborhoods their parents worked so hard to enter. – Rappler.com