HOME CRUNCH COULD CRUSH CALIFORNIA DREAM FOR LATINOS.

Byline: Dana Bartholomew Staff Writer

Soaring home prices could turn the California dream of homeownership into a rent-induced nightmare for the Golden State's fastest growing group - Latinos, according to a study released today.

While nearly all working- and middle-class families struggle to afford homes costing upward of $313,000, the median price in California, Latinos have been among the hardest hit, according to the study, ``Rewarding Ambition: Latinos, Housing, and the Future of California,'' by the La Jolla Institute and Pepperdine University. It will be discussed today at a Latino housing conference in Santa Ana.

With Latino families increasingly forced to live under one roof or leave the state for cheaper housing, California risks barring a rising population from owning homes, according to the study.

``Latinos, the predominant new wave of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, would become the first major group to find themselves, through no fault of their own, excluded from owning their piece of the California dream,'' researchers concluded.

``The implication of this failure could be severe.''

The report comes days after the U.S. Conference of Mayors met in Southern California to discuss a crisis in affordable housing and to call upon Congress for money to build homes and apartments for low-income residents.

In their telephone survey of 504 Latino homeowners and renters across the state during May and June 2002, researchers observed the following:

--Latino home buyers purchase more than one in five homes sold in California, nearly half of them in Los Angeles County.

--Nearly two-thirds of U.S.-born Latinos own homes, while fewer than a third of those born outside the United States do, with most having purchased a home in the past five years.

--Latinos tend to buy homes for family considerations rather than primarily as an investment. Foreign-born Latinos pay 43 percent of their income on mortgages compared with 32 percent for their U.S.-born counterparts.

--More than half of Latino home shoppers hope to pay $150,000 or less for a single-family home, with a down payment of $10,000 or less.

``Immigrants, and I know this from my parents' experience, want to buy a house and send their kids to college,'' said Maria Cano, president of the Mexican-American Political Association-San Fernando Valley.

``If you can't buy a home, there's no grounding, there's instability and it does affect whether your children will invest in the community, go to school, vote and become responsible, productive citizens.''

The Pepperdine/La Jolla report concluded that Latinos, forced out of a spiraling housing market, risk becoming a class of renters among land-owning elites.

This gap, if not addressed fully, could promote discouragement, alienation and political detachment harmful to California tradition and middle-class values.

``The premise of America, and certainly California, is if you work hard you can own a home,'' said Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow of the Davenport Institute of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, and a co-author of the report. ``But for a whole new wave, that is a denied opportunity.

``It's a crisis really for all California - Latino California is California, it's the future ... We're becoming a mestizo society. We must find a solution that promotes middle-class values - we don't want to inherit the land problems of the developing world, with a yearning to redistribute property.''

San Fernando Valley real estate agents who sell to Latino home buyers said it wasn't unusual for two, three and up to five Latino families to pool their resources to buy a house.

While many Latinos who own homes are benefiting from the real-estate boom by moving into larger digs, others are forced to live as far as Palmdale to afford their first home.

``The first time, they say, Oh, my God, I'm not going to be able to afford it, it's too much money,'' said Francisco Reynoso, an agent for Remax Metro in San Fernando who markets to Latinos in the Northeast Valley. ``Sometimes they buy a house and two or three families live there in order to keep up the payments.

``They kind of feel like the American dream is going away.''

Many researchers and business-economic development analysts, however, disagreed.

Roberto Barragan, president of the Valley Economic Development Center and member of a mayor's Housing Trust Fund Task Force to discuss how to spend $100 million on affordable housing, said Latinos represent the fastest-growing group to buy homes in Pacoima and South Central Los Angeles.

``I'm pretty confident the Latino community will not be aced out from the American dream,'' he said. ``It's a very resilient community ... When the prices come down next year, we'll be back in the hunt.''

Other experts on California housing suggested Monday that it isn't just Latinos who suffer from runaway housing costs, but many groups across the racial and ethnic spectrum.

``It's being melodramatic, overly optimistic,'' Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning and Development, said of Kotkin's study. ``It's not the only group to be excluded'' from buying homes.

``Young whites, children of baby boomers, and blacks under age 45 have also been excluded. Furthermore, it's not permanent: Latinos are rapidly moving up.''

James Allen, a geographer at California State University, Northridge, who just published a book on Southern California demographics and housing, agreed.

``Black families have a lower rate of homeownership and smaller families who can't as easily pool their resources to buy a house,'' he said.

To ease the crisis, Kotkin and his researchers called upon banks to extend credit to working families for home purchases. He also urged state lawmakers to revise tax policies to favor homes over retail stores.

But one expert on Latino housing said the Pepperdine/La Jolla study only stated what has long been known by Latinos across the state: Wages don't keep up with housing costs.

And while Los Angeles funnels tens of millions of dollars in housing money to boost downtown, the city virtually ignores its surrounding poor neighborhoods, said CSUN Chicano studies professor David R. Diaz.

``That's why we have a supply crisis,'' he said. ``We're in the fourth decade of federal housing programs and subsidies and we're worse off ... than the civil-rights era.''

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SOURCE: Pepperdine University