Immigration, race, mortgage lending, and the geography of debt in Canada’s global cities

Abstract

While scholars typically analyze debt relations as social relations, often at the national or global level with respect to international flows of global capital and interest payments, there has been less attention on how international mobility and immigration are constitutive of geographies of debt. An urbanized nation with a reputation for welcoming high levels of immigration, as well as for escaping the worst of the global financial crisis with no banking crisis, Canada has also received international attention for high housing prices and high levels of household debt, particularly in its global cities. What has not yet received sufficient attention are the potential effects of federal government policies and programs in encouraging new immigrants to take out disproportionately large mortgages to access owner-occupied housing, nor the implications of such programs and migrant flows for understanding geographies of debt. Justified by proponents of asset-based welfare, homeownership is purported to be crucial for immigrant integration and economic mobility, and yet, literature linking the socio-spatial dynamics of immigrant debt to asset-based welfare policies and the creation of citizen subjectivities remains scarce. This paper investigates questions related to these issues in Canada's three global cities, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, using data aggregated at the neighbourhood scale. The results point to an interaction effect between federal policies encouraging homeownership, metropolitan housing costs, and neighbourhood immigrant debt levels. Not only do immigrants bear significantly higher debt burdens than do native-born Canadians, but many neighbourhoods with a high concentration of immigrants, particularly in the metropolitan areas with the tightest housing markets, have significantly higher levels of mortgage debt than other neighbourhoods. Such geographies of debt, we suggest, have implications not only for intra-urban spatial distributions of debt and wealth, but also for understanding how the spatiality of debt interacts with federal policies and national financial vulnerabilities and resiliences, pointing to the importance of immigration flows and policies in helping produce and maintain financial flows and financial power.