FRIDAY,APRIL 26,2002
NATION
THEUNIVERSITYDAILYKANSAN - 7A
Ethnicity affects home buying
The Associated Press
MANASSAS PARK, Va. Cuban-Americans are more likely than Mexican-Americans to own their homes. Puerto Ricans tend to rent rather than buy.
Regardless of their background, though, overall homeownership rates for Hispanics rose in America during the economic prosperity of the 1990s, census data show.
The rates still lag behind the average for all Americans.
"In the last three, four years, it's grown a lot. There are cheap homes here," said Jose Pineda, who immigrated from El Salvador in 1981. He now co-owns a restaurant in this Washington suburb and owns a town home in a development 20 minutes away.
The Hispanic rate grew from 42 percent in 1990 to 46 percent, aided by more flexible lending practices and the good economy. Overall, 66 percent of all American homes were owned in 2000.
up from 64 percent a decade earlier.
By comparison, 46 percent of homes were owned by black people in 2000, along with 53 percent of Asian homes and 72 percent of white homes.
"Hispanic" is considered an ethnicity, not a race. People of Hispanic ethnicity can be of any race.
Owning a home is more prevalent in some Hispanic groups than in others. Much of that is due to where these different groups were settled.
The latest data, released Wednesday, included figures on the three largest Hispanic groups in the United States: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans. Most Cubans live in Florida, where housing prices and the cost of living are lower than in New York, which has a large Puerto Rican population.
Cubans, as a group, tend to be older, better educated and better paid, which lend themselves to homeownership.
Cubans also tend to have been in the United States longer, which has given them more time to build enough wealth to buy a home. Much of the most recent Hispanic immigrant waves have come from Mexico and central America.
Those effects play out in the statistics: Of the three largest Hispanic groups in the United States, 58 percent of homes nationwide headed by Cubans were owned, compared with 48 percent of Mexican homes and 35 percent of Puerto Rican homes.
In 1990, 51 percent of Cuban homes were owned, compared with 47 percent of Mexican homes and 26 percent of Puerto Rican homes.
Geographically, the largest gains in Hispanic homeownership were in immigrant gateway states with large Mexican populations including California, New Mexico and Texas, said Patrick Simmons, a demographer with the nonprofit Fannie Mae Foundation.
Cotton scientist honored for work
The Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS — To cotton farmers in the South, Ruth Rogan Benerito was a hero.
As a scientist for the Department of Agriculture in the 1960s, Benerito was on a mission to improve on Mother Nature. The result: wrinkle-free cotton.
The 86-year-old retiree, who has some 55 patents, has been honored with the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for Invention. She was given the award Wednesday night in San Francisco.
Her easy-care cotton process, patented in 1969, gave cotton growers a fighting chance against new wrinkle-free synthetics.
"In those days, the synthetic materials were very popular, and worldwide they were trying to make cotton compete with synthetics," Benerito said.
Benerito began her career at a time when women weren't expected to go into scientific fields. But her mother, an artist and early feminist, encouraged her to be anything she wanted.
After finishing high school at 14, Benerito waited a year and then enrolled at Newcomb College, the women's college at Tulane University. Majoring in chemistry, with minors in physics and math, she was one of only two women allowed to take physical chemistry courses at the university in New Orleans.
She earned her bachelor's degree in 1955, at age 19, and went on to earn a master's at Tulane and her doctorate at the University of Chicago.
In 1953, she joined the Agriculture Department's Southern
Regional Research Center in New Orleans, where she worked for 33 years. Her specialty became the use of cellulose chemistry to solve practical problems in the cotton, wood and paper industries. But she also invented a fat emulsion for intravenous feeding in long-term medical patients.
"Everybody that knew her and worked with her just loved her because she was just so technically competent and so gracious," said Gene Blanchard, acting research leader of the cotton, textile and chemistry research unit at the research center.
Benerito also broke down barriers with her talent for science, Blanchard said.
"Back when she started, women weren't so prevalent in the workplace, especially in scientific areas," he said.
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