The Community Service Society of New York issued a report today by Tom Waters and Victor Bach that found that housing stresses that each immigrant group in the city experiences "tend to affect both low- and higher-income members of the community, and to continue from the first to the second immigrant generation."

"Some immigrant groups - such as Dominicans and Mexicans - tend to have low incomes, similar to those of non-immigrant black and Latino households. Groups with more education - such as Africans and South Asians - end to earn higher incomes. Second-generation households tend to have higher incomes than first-generational households for the same country or region of origin, but between-group differences in income appear to continue in the second generation," the study said.

"The borough of Queens has the largest proportion of immigrant and second-generation households: 70 percent. But some immigrant groups are heavily concentrated elsewhere" Dominicans cluster in Manhattan and the West Bronx, while other Carribeans and those from the former Soviet Union have settled in Brooklyn.'

"As of 2008, 44 percent of New York City households were headed by first-generational immigrants, and another 13 percent were headed by the children of immigrants," the report, entitled "Housing the City of Immigrants," said, adding that Immigrants as a whole experience worse housing conditions than other New Yorkers" and "pay a larger share of their income in rent, and there twice as likely to live in crowded conditions."

"Immigrants as a whole," the report said, "are less likely to live in assisted housing and more likely to be rent-regulated tenants than non-immigrants," and "second-generation households are much more likely to own homes than either the first generation or later-generation groups" and "low-income first-generation households are much more likely to live in unregulated rentals." "The low numbers of low-income immigrants in subsidized or public housing are probably due to long waiting lists and admissions policies that tend to exclude more recently arrive immigrants."

"Before 1979," the study continued, "the great majority of the city's immigrants came from Europe. Today, fewer than a quarter of immigrant household heads come from there - and, with the exception of those born in the former Soviet Union, most arrived before 1970. Almost half of the city's immigrants (49 percent) come from the Americas, and 23 percent come from Asia- and most of them have arrived in the last 20 years. Today's immigrants are primarily people of color: 18 percent black, 31 percent Latino, and 24 percent Asian."

The report said that "higher-income immigrant households (those with incomes of at least four times the poverty threshold) tend to live in lower-income neighborhoods than one would expect based on their incomes."

"Mexicans and households from the former Soviet union have the worst rent burdens, Mexicans and South Asians have the most crowding, and Dominicans and Africans have the worst apartment conditions," according to the study.

The report said that "The State of New York should halt the erosion of the rent-regulated housing stock by ending vacancy decontrol of rent-stabilized apartments" and it should also "make rent regulation more protective of low-income tenants by eliminating rent increases based on 'preferential rents' and by reducing allowable rent increases during vacancies."