The litter-filled streets of Sunset Park are an unlikely setting for a housing comeback. Flanked by an elevated six-lane highway on one side and a 478-acre cemetery on the other, the Brooklyn neighbourhood has seen house prices climb since the economic downturn.

For that it can thank immigrants such as Liu Song Yan, whose dreams of home ownership are driving the neighbourhood’s housing market recovery – an increasingly common pattern across the US.

“It is important for me to own my own home,” says 66-year old Mr Liu, who started life in New York as a clothing factory worker after arriving from Taishan, China in 1985. After 20 years of long working days, scrimping and saving to build a cash stash, he put down a deposit on a modest two-storey brick house in Sunset Park, an area that has long been a magnet for working-class immigrants.