For years, the real estate industry has touted the importance of immigrant buyers to its long-term well-being.

Much of what we know about their buying habits has been focused on the traditional gateway cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

Thanks to a study of 1990 and 2000 Census data by Gary Painter and Zhou Yu of the University of Southern California's Lusk Center for Real Estate, we have an idea of home-buying patterns of immigrants entering the United States through other cities such as Atlanta, Las Vegas and Tampa.

There always have been flaws in how we have looked at the effects of immigration on growth patterns. The assumption is that everyone who immigrated to the United States between 1850 and 1924 came through New York, Boston and San Francisco.

I've picked 1850 because that's when Irish immigration really picked up steam. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 effectively cut the flow from all but favored countries until 1965.

The current wave of immigration, mostly from Asia and Latin American, started in the early 1990s, most experts agree.

Although a huge number of immigrants entered the United States through those three ports during those 74 years, others cities -- New Haven, CT; Providence, RI; Charleston, SC; Baltimore, MD and New Orleans, LA -- received their share.

A vast number of Irish immigrants came through Canada first before they finally arrived in the United States. Because Ireland and Canada were part of the British Empire, ships carrying sickness couldn't be turned away from Canadian ports as they could from those in the United States.

So there were millions of immigrants whose lives, and home-buying patterns, were undocumented.

There was a better chance of immigrants buying homes in smaller cities than larger ones. Most of the people who arrived in New York were tenement dwellers. Most of the people who landed in San Francisco went elsewhere.

Boston has been the best place to study immigration patterns, especially among the Irish in the 19th century, because it was smaller and surrounded by a warren of small industrial cities and towns where the possibility of homeownership might have been better.

One of the major findings of the study by Painter and Yu was that lower housing costs in smaller cities do not immediately translate into higher homeownership rates.

They also found that immigrants pool resources to buy one home for multiple families, which California new-home developers have been reporting for at least 10 years.

Walter H. Richardson, a new-home builder in Newport Beach, CA, told an Urban Land Institute session in Philadelphia back in 1996 that the need to accommodate larger families in affordable housing was especially important in his state, which is home to a growing number of Mexican and Asian immigrants.

"It's a niche," he said. "You find it and build to it."

One other finding by the USC team: Younger immigrants are more likely to own homes than U.S.-born counterparts

Historically, that's not so surprising. Homeownership is a key to wealth in this country -- the key for those who don't have first-hand experience with our sophisticated capitalism.

Although there are many countries -- primarily Russia and former Easter European nations, where property ownership was against the law -- who have no tradition of home ownership, immigrants from countries such as Mexico and Bangladesh do have that background.

I don't know if it is still true, but somewhere along the way I learned that Bangladesh had the highest homeownership rate in the world.

My mother's family, which came from Italy to the United States in 1903, used housing to get a firm foothold here.

Marketing his carpentry skills, my grandfather began building homes after arriving, and, within a year owned a two-family house free and clear. Four of his five daughters married the sons of other Italian immigrants who had also bought houses just as quickly.

Mortgages weren't widely available, so they worked hard, saved quickly and bought with cash. In my grandfather's case, he bought empty land and built several houses.

When you buy a house, you buy a future that will likely outlive you, your children and generations to come. It's not simply a matter of owning sticks and bricks, but having access to an initial investment that will pay dividends in any number of ways: money for business ventures, education and, probably most important, to help your children buy their first house and continue the cycle.

If you are a real estate agent and target the immigrant market, that's your sales pitch. Maybe it also will work on young people who were born here.

Published: December 30, 2004

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Al Heavens writes about real estate and home repair and improvement. He is the author of What No One Ever Tells You About Renovating Your Home: Real-Life Advice For Hassle-free, Cost-Effective Remodeling.