Does wanting to own a home build wealth? We use homeownership rates in immigrants’ countries of origin (HOCO) as a source of exogenous variation in the desire to own. A 10pp higher HOCO raises U.S. homeownership by 1.5pp; the effect strengthens with time in the U.S., transmits across generations, and is not explained by origin-country economic conditions. High-affinity households respond more to credit expansions, default less, and accumulate more housing and total wealth by retirement, but these gains arise from buying early and holding on in favorable markets rather than from owning per se: an owner who bought at 28 ends within $25,000 of an otherwise identical renter, ahead in half of states and behind in the other half. We then price the preference as the consumption value of owning rather than renting the same house. Tenure barely responds to the cost of owning, so observed origin gaps imply premia of several thousand dollars a year in either direction, of which the home-country norm explains about a tenth. That norm is worth, in present value, about twice the home equity and 60% of the total wealth that accompany it at retirement: the preference is of the same order as the outcomes it produces, and the outcomes come from how these households own, not from owning. Policies that lower the price of owning therefore reach few households who would not have bought anyway.
Real Estate Department