How immigrants get locked out of buying a California home — even when they can afford it

A few weeks ago I sat down with a family wanting to buy a home in San Diego. They have three children, a steady income, savings and they have owned property before.

What they don’t have is a financial history that the American mortgage system knows how to read. It’s an issue I keep seeing with immigrant buyers, a missing factor when we talk about affordability.  

We talk about home prices, interest rates, how much a family needs to earn. We don’t often ask: What if the family has the money, but the system can’t count it?

I came to the United States from Ukraine in 2022 with no American credit history. I had worked, paid bills, run a business for years — none of it followed me onto my U.S. credit report. 

Today I’m a licensed realtor in San Diego working mostly with immigrants and first-time buyers, so I’ve witnessed this from both chairs.

About 28% of Californians, including roughly 1 in 4 San Diegans, were born outside the U.S. Most of them are in their working years. Yet less than 1 in 5 California households can afford a median-priced home. In San Diego it’s worse, about 17%. 

Here’s what that immigrant family with three children is running into: They want to sell an apartment overseas and put the proceeds toward a down payment. But because of conditions there, the money can only reach them as cash.

A lender can’t accept cash without documentation showing where it came from — a rule that applies to everyone. But it doesn’t land on everyone the same way.

An American family selling a house in Ohio gets a wire from escrow and the paperwork writes itself. This family gets the same value in a form the system can’t see and the money sits there, unusable, and the level of house they can qualify for drops a tier.

The credit problem works the same way. If an immigrant paid a mortgage and utilities on time for 15 years in another country, that history doesn’t arrive here with them. They start over. 

For an immigrant, it can feel like your financial life just disappeared at the border. The question a lender has isn’t whether you’re responsible, but whether it can be documented the way U.S. underwriting requires.

Then there’s the space between programs. 

San Diego has real homebuying assistance. The Housing Commission offers deferred loans and closing-cost grants, and CalHFA has its own products. 

They work; I’ve used them with clients. But they’re built around income ceilings, and a family that earns slightly too much falls into a gap with nothing in it. They’re too well-off for help and too new for the market. 

What’s left is the bottom of the inventory — not because they can’t afford the middle, but because the middle asks for a credit profile that takes years to build. That family with three children is sitting in that gap now.

There is movement toward change. Federal mortgage standards shifted this year to allow alternative credit data, such as rent, utilities and phone payment records. 

That matters. But a rule change in Washington and a loan officer applying it in San Diego are two different events, likely years apart.

I don’t think we need another program. We need better information, delivered earlier — before families start looking for homes, not after.

California’s legal net immigration fell by nearly a half between 2024 and 2025 — from 248,000 to 126,000 — and the state’s total population fell for the first time in years. So it’s worth asking: Who are we quietly making it impossible for — not through price, but through paperwork?