A few weeks ago I sat down with a family who wants to buy a home in San Diego. They have three children, steady income, savings and they have owned property before.
What they don’t have is a financial history the American mortgage system knows how to read.
I keep seeing this with immigrant buyers, and I think it is missing from how we talk about affordability here. We talk about prices. We talk about rates. We talk about how much a family needs to earn. We don’t often ask a different question: 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 and managed money for years — none of it followed me into my U.S. credit report. Today I’m a licensed Realtor in San Diego working mostly with immigrant and first-time buyers, so I’ve now watched this from both chairs.
The scale matters. According to the California Association of Realtors, only 17% of San Diego County households could afford the median-priced home, which is above $1 million this year. And roughly one in four residents of the city was born outside the United States — about 348,000 people, most of them in their working years.
Here is what that family is running into. They want to sell an apartment overseas and put the proceeds toward a down payment. Because of conditions in that country, the money can only reach them as cash. A lender cannot accept cash without documentation showing where it came from — a rule that exists for good reasons and 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 cannot see. So the money sits there, real and unusable, and the house they qualify for drops a tier.
The credit problem works the same way. If you paid a mortgage and utilities on time for fifteen years somewhere else, that history generally doesn’t arrive with you. You start over. For an immigrant it can feel like your financial life disappeared at the border — and the question a lender asks isn’t whether you’re responsible with money, but whether it can be documented the way U.S. underwriting requires. That is a very different thing from not having enough.
Then there’s the space between the programs. San Diego has real assistance — the San Diego Housing Commission offers deferred loans and closing-cost grants, and CalHFA has its own products. They work, and 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.
Too well-off for help, too new for the conventional 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 right now.
The procedural details compound it. Most assistance programs require eight hours of approved homebuyer education before funds are released, and San Diego escrows close in three to four weeks. City programs also require lenders from an approved list, and not every CalHFA lender is on it. The problem isn’t that these rules are unreasonable. It’s that immigrant families usually discover them only once they’re already mid-transaction.
There is real movement. Federal mortgage standards shifted this year toward allowing alternative credit data — rent, utilities, phone payments — when evaluating borrowers. That matters, because someone who has paid $3,000 in rent every month for four years has demonstrated something about their ability to make a housing payment. But a rule changing in Washington and a loan officer in San Diego applying it are two different events, and the distance between them is measured in years.
So I don’t think we need another program. I think we need better information, delivered earlier.
Tell families what documentation they’ll need before they start looking. Publish program requirements in the languages this county actually speaks, and put them where immigrant families already go — community organizations, cultural centers, churches. Give lenders clearer guidance on documenting international assets, so legitimate money isn’t disqualified by geography. And look hard at the cliff between assistance eligibility and market viability, because families are falling off it.
San Diego lost population last year, largely because immigration slowed. We spend a lot of energy asking how to make housing affordable. It’s worth also asking who we’re quietly making it impossible for — not through price, but through paperwork.
Anastasiia Chystiukhina is a licensed California Realtor in San Diego. She came to the United States from Ukraine in 2022 and works primarily with immigrant and first-time homebuyers.
