After renting for around two decades, Mysa Khasawneh, an immigrant from Jordan, finally made a down payment for a two-bedroom house on Columbus’ Far West Side in October.
A mother of four — including one child with special needs — Khasawneh said that homeownership has allowed her to save money that she would have spent on rent and invest it in her children’s futures.
Now, she has been informally advising other women in the local Jordanian American community who are thinking of buying a home.
“I tell people to start small. Even if it’s not your ideal, it’s yours. And then you can move. This house can be a down payment for another house. More people are going towards buying now, from my community,” said Khasawneh, who works as an early childhood services administrator.
Khasawneh is among around 59% of foreign-born Ohio residents who own their home, according to a Dispatch analysis of 2022 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. That’s lower than the percentage of native-born homeowners in Ohio — around 70% — but the data also shows that immigrant homeownership steadily increases with one’s length of residence in the U.S. For immigrants living in the U.S. over 30 years, the homeownership rate in Ohio is over 80%.