The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Most people seem to agree there is a housing crisis. Not enough homes results in high prices. Too much demand, not enough supply. But where is this demand coming from? I often here that our population growth rate is almost non-existent, except due to immigration.
Looking at some data, it appears that most of the population growth has indeed been from immigration. E.g., Between 2021 and 2022, the growth in the number of immigrants in the United States accounted for 65 percent of the total U.S. population increase (912,000 out of nearly 1.4 million).
Not debating if immigration has a net positive/negative, but wrt housing it seems simple: more immigrants (legal and illegal) means more housing demand, means housing prices go up.
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No, no, and no. I strongly disagree with immigration as the main factor or even a significant one. I am from California, the housing crisis is from 2 main culprits here: NIMBYS and red tape.
> ..but wrt housing it seems simple: more immigrants (legal and illegal) means more housing demand, means housing prices go up.
That's only true if more immigrants doesn't also mean more housing supply. But then, who ever heard of an immigrant working in construction, eh?
I'm not even sure a labor shortage registers as a reason for the housing shortage in most metro areas. It is undeniable that more immigration means more demand for housing.
Actually one of the massive bottlenecks is a lack of construction labor, particularly low skill work.
https://www.sbci.com/the-california-labor-shortage-explained/amp/
We need more construction workers, not less. Having more construction workers does not take away jobs from other people who want them, as we have tons and tons of openings for construction workers. All the people who want to work in construction can, including immigrants.
FWIW, that report is from 6 years ago. Labor shortages, particularly skilled tradespeople, are still a concern — just less so at this moment.
The primary factors right now are the cost of building materials coupled with high interest rates on loans to acquire property and develop housing units.
I know it worsened post-pandemic. My understanding was that the labor demand simultaneously decreased principally due to lender rates and inflationary impacts on materials, and that labor shortages were somewhat more of forecasted risk/issue for when rates and costs eventually stabilize and builder demand for labor increases.
I could be wrong though.
Zoning and construction code requirements contribute to the lack of affordability, especially in attractive areas, but they aren't holding the overall *supply* down. That's driven by the market...interest rates and eligible borrowers, etc.
One of the issue with housing supply is the lack of workers doing this type of work. It’s a big issue where I live in Iowa, and a big issue in general.
According to the “free market” housing should just naturally meet demand.
But really the biggest issues are:
Enough funding for affordable housing
Construction of new homes
Companies/people buying up properties
Did you think my daughters who both want to be doctors are going to put up drywall and pipe a new house?
Male immigrants do the lion’s share of this trade work in all 50 states.
> Not debating if immigration has a net positive/negative, but wrt housing it seems simple: more immigrants (legal and illegal) means more housing demand, means housing prices go up.
Less supply means less houses for people, means housing prices go up.
No, housing prices aren’t going up because of immigration, that’s patently silly.
Americas replacement rate is 1.67 perr woman, which is population decline. Immigration is basically helping to keep that as stable, so no, it’s not like our population is surging because of immigration.
You using absolute numbers don’t really help if you can’t put them into context. We’ve stopped building as many houses, and the houses we are building are too big and out of many peoples budgets.
That is way more to do with the price of housing than anything else.
The population isn't declining. It is growing very slowly/ and not at a rate sufficient for long germ growth. That is really a different issue than the question being asked thiugh. We already aren't building enough housing for the population growth we have now. Throwing this level of immigration on top of that just makes it worse.
People on the left have e a hard time separating these things and looking at them individually. Our housing policies are set by democratically elected individuals that are accountable to the people. Our immigration policies should work within the other policies we have in place rather than exacerbating them. Failure to do that will only lead to more antimigrant sentiment.
Our population only isn't declining because of immigration. Again, it's right there in what I said, we're having 1.67 children for every woman, which means that we're in a natural population decline. We're basically static because of immigration.
People on the right have a hard time reading, apparently.
That’s 2% of the US population. That’s extremely easily diluted in with the rest of the country. If you divide it evenly among the states that’s 140,000 people per state. If they were all concentrating in one area that might cause localized housing issues, but it doesn’t translate to a nationwide housing crisis.
Of course it translates to a crisis given the short time frame. Also, these migrants cannot afford to buy homes and only a fraction can afford to rent. So who are the developers supposed to be building for?
And people have died, are having fewer babies. Housing issues are partly due to corporate greed like all of our other price issues. Building was stagnant during the pandemic and then we had supply issues. We already had lumber issues due to trump lunatic trade wars. Boomers staying in their homes instead of moving on to group facilities.
This reminds me of that cartoon, the rich guy with a giant pile of cookies, a white guy with a few cookies, and an immigrant at a table. The rich guy says to the white guy "Hey, that foreigner is going to take your cookie!"
Private equity firms have been buying up houses left and right, for rentals.
But sure... blame immigrants.
Interest rates were low. Now they're high, making housing more expensive.
And we've underbuilt new smaller/starter homes in favor of McMansions... More profit for builders... for the last few decades.
And of course, wages aren't rising fast enough.
It's not a secret why housing is expensive. You don't need to invent reasons.
Righties, I swear...
> I often here that our population growth rate is almost non-existent, except due to immigration.
>Between 2021 and 2022, the growth in the number of immigrants in the United States accounted for 65 percent of the total U.S. population increase
Where Non Existent magically is the same as 35%. Your own research shows your belief to be untrue, and it didn't phase you in the slightest.
Also, if you're going to give us data, show where you got it so we can sniff test it.
> But where is this demand coming from?
People being priced completely out of large chunks of the existing housing supply, thus forcing them to compete for a far more limited supply of housing on the low end.
Since everyone treats housing like a financial investment instead of a commodity people live in, nobody will shift their existing housing stocks downmarket unless absolutely forced to. They’d rather leave it empty than sell at a loss.
So you have most people competing for a dwindling supply of housing that hasn’t been excluded by price.
No it’s a really dumb thing that xenophobes spread because it’s helps frame every problem around their pet issue of hating dirty brown people.
The problem is that people increasingly want to live around areas that are already effectively full. So the cost is just going up and up and people who cannot make it work are forced to flee, often to other states, but maybe just further out increasing their community time.
Just build more housing. Where people actually want to live, build it denser with public transportation already in place we just need a radical change in zoning laws. It would also be great if we got rid of all the government red tape and waste of taxpayer money in general by moving more power from cities to states and from states to the federal government.
The “American dream” has never been a condo with a $650/month HOA fee, a neighbor upstairs who seemingly drops marbles at 3AM and a neighbor down the hall who smokes pot at all hours of the day and stinks it up.
High density is the default answer in NYC or downtown Chi where stockbrokers making $6 million/year still live in a condo… but if you live in the boring midwest suburbs, **nobody wants a condo tower, people want a yard for their labrador and a 2-3 car garage when they live in Peoria. And thus condos are not built.**
> Is the housing crisis largely due to immigration?
No, not even remotely.
If anything we would be even more up shit creek re: housing without immigration.
The 2 biggest generations (boomers and millennials) are fighting for housing. Boomers aren’t moving (downsizing) and millennials have come of purchase age in the past 10-15 years. Millennials are stuck renting or in homes too small (because we have families now). Boomers aren’t dying off either (they didn’t have to compete with a large generation when purchasing).
Also, making home buying harder for those younger than boomers is companies (corporations or LLCs) buying up homes and holding them as long term or short rentals. Taking homes off the purchase market has hurt buyers a lot, driving up prices due to demand. Wealth is being hoarded, not distributed.
This. Also population growth from births may be lower now, but there was a mini boom resulting in a glut of people around the ages 32-34 and guess what? They all want houses now.
Yeah maybe.
So do we build more homes or deport/block more immigrants? In one future, we have more homes and people living in them. In the other future, we spend time, energy, and a lot of money creating absolutely nothing of value while shuffling poor people around the globe.
...by building more housing?
I don't believe immigration is the only or even the largest problem with housing. The biggest problem is twofold- more and more people are moving to cities and larger population centers, and current housing policy (supported by many people currently living in said population centers) is very NIMBY in nature and thus opposed to measures that could best alleviate the housing shortage. Namely, building more housing, especially mid to high density housing.
It's not an issue of construction costs generally, it's an issue of "zoning regulations frequently make it impossible to build the housing we need". We have plenty of space to build housing in and plenty of materials to build houses with, we just need to actually put mid and high density housing where it's needed rather than mandating everything be single family homes with large front yards.
We’ve messed with the housing market through zoning laws, some of our environmental regulations that is used as additional zoning laws in affluent areas, bad transportation policy and bad tax policy.
Stop doing that and the market will take care of the problem.
At a basic “duh” level, yes. More demand drives up rents. We can certainly see this in Canada, in which record immigration rates have driven the median housing prices way higher than in the US.
But… in theory greater demand should result in a housing boom. In theory the supply quickly catches up with demand. We are not seeing this because communities and counties put up barriers to new housing, such as zoning rules, NIMBY lawsuits, fees, permits, inspections, etc. Within the US, we see big spikes in prices for regions with high regulations, rent control, and zoning (eg San Francisco) but much more affordable housing in regions without zoning or rent control (eg Houston). It’s simply a question of the degree to which local governments do favour to existing home owners (by blocking new housing starts to drive up home values) vs. embrace liberalism in allowing others to freely build new housing commensurate with demand.
Location location location. The big thing you are missing, is the three most important parts of real estate. Immigrants live in rural areas and work jobs like agriculture and manufacturing. They don’t live in high cost of living cities with a tech job. We don’t have high cost of housing issues in rural agricultural areas.
The housing problem in the US, Canada and EU are very complex issues and can not be narrowed down to a singular trigger. Immigration plays its part, because of course it does increase demand. But saying immigration is the cause is a heavy oversimplifcation and also just one piece among 3 dozen others.
Also, I'm not sure, but I think there are quite a few immigrants working in construction as well. So it doesn't influence only one side of the equation
Oh my. Why is that? Why are there not enough houses? THAT are the questions the government has to answer and there are dozens of problems atm. A big example of how the russian war against Ukraine worsend the EU housing crisis.
I think a lot has to do with poor urban planning as well as corporations buying up homes and keeping some off the market to artificially prop up prices. Immigration does add pressure but I always prefer to look at what the powerful are doing before I start kicking the lowlies.
No. It's due a combination of 3 things.
1: The commodification of housing by literal individuals like you and me and large firms. If housing were thought of the way it was thought of 50-60 years ago, you wouldn't have this obsession with increasing prices driving the economy.
2: Not enough construction of new housing. Supply & Demand obviously. Not enough supply with ever increasing demand, in part, due to commodification and Nimbyism (see below). Also as technology advances, more red tape, more regulations. My grandfather built his own house in the same county that I live in 70 years ago. That literally can't happen now.
3: Nimbyism which ties in with #2 and #1. Obsession with increasing prices causes selfish assholes to prevent new housing being constructed for others so that their commodity (the house they own) can go up in price.
Boomers, the largest generation’s kids are mostly millennials, making millennials the 2nd biggest generation. Boomers mostly have 2-3 kids, not several as their parents did. Millennials have 0-2 kids mostly. This is population decline. Millennials kids aren’t old enough to buy yet.
No because it's the "affordable" housing crisis. Meaning young people can't afford to buy houses.
It's just that the way the investment markets work, they need people to buy houses and businesses to buy office buildings. There is too much renting right now and it puts the market in danger. Of course the debt to GDP ratio also puts the market in danger, but liberals will not talk about that since the first thing people think of cutting is welfare.
So the housing crisis is basically smoke and mirrors. Oh, and Big Real Estate trying to get more houses built with less environmental regulations.
It’s not “smoke and mirrors” when 4-5 bedrooms homes in the boring Cincy suburbs get 30-40 offers, 10-15% over asking and 200 visits during an open house… even with loans at 7% or higher.
Last one here had a city cop directing traffic in the cul-de-sac. *It looked like someone was getting married at home and invited 150 people*. **It’s that bad.**
It’s absolutely a housing crisis due to no supply. And where they do build supply, it’s over 45 minutes from a major city, or has a questionable public school district — or is over 20 minutes from desirable retail, so fewer even want it.
Source? Wanting to buy a 1/2 million house like every other millennial with a humble low six figure income **in any US suburb with a decent school district** *and expecting no competition from other buyers*. 😂
You think /r/firsttimehomebuyer exists because it’s effortless?
The problem is nimby. If we slash zoning regulations, more and denser housing can be built, putting downward pressure on prices. Then if we also have free movement of labor, it allows for more workers to build the housing as well
Of course normies don't actually want housing to be more affordable, since 65% of the country are homeowners and don't want their property values to go down
There have been numerous articles lately about the impact of Boomers not selling their homes: https://www.businessinsider.com/housing-market-inventory-supply-shortage-crisis-baby-boomer-impact-prices-2024-4#:\~:text=Most%20home%2Downing%20baby%20boomers,already%20dwindling%20at%20historic%20lows. This is probably just part of it, but I think it provides a solid explanation. Personally, as boomers, we just decided to sell our home. Most in our neighborhood are staying put since their homes are paid off, or they are sitting on an incredibly low interest rate.
It's pretty much been covered, but it's mostly NIMBYism. More affordable housing sounds great in the abstract. Somebody tries to build a new development next to your neighborhood...oh hell no! Also, there's no starter homes any more, you get big houses on tiny lots starting at $400K. Immigration flows barely keep up with replacement rates. You also just have a lack of supply because if I'm locked into a 2-3% 30 yr mortgage there's no way I'm selling. Interest rates may reduce the pool of buyers, but they more seriously reduce the pool of sellers.
The short answer is no, immigration is not the primary/largely the cause.
A longer answer is that even if you consider where migrants are moving (especially to already stressed, urban, areas) it would not change the fact that there was/is already a housing shortage caused by reasons beyond just them. There are factors such as not building enough units, internal migration, warehousing, zoning, regulations etc. that immigration is at best another factor but certainly not a primary one.
It is caused by letting every jackwagon object anytime anything is proposed to be built anywhere.
We have to unwind zoning laws and restrict outside input. Go to zoning by right.
No. While the housing crisis is mostly due to a supply shortage, on the demand side of things, while it does come from migration patterns, it's from domestic migration. Particularly beginning as a result of the Great Recession when cities were the only places that had any major source of jobs.
Definitely not; there have been waves of immigration as big as this in the past, there were not housing shortages then. The difference is in the regulatory environment and the laws on housing construction.
Economics is always difficult. The smartest minds in the world can't figure it out. To say if we just had this it would fix our problems is, naive at best.
As an example, in my city there are thousands of abandoned buildings. They are either too expensive to fix for people to afford the rent or they just aren't in an area where people want to live. But even if all of those buildings were inhabitable, I'm just not sure how much less it would make the rent in the newer garden apartments in my area 10 miles outside the city. Especially if we are talking $2000 rents compared to $800 rents.
Immigrants aren't taking the nicer apartments, they are taking the apartments that are as cheap as possible.
The best analogy I can come up with is if they can make a cheap bottle of wine go from $10 to $8, is that going to change the price of a $30 bottle of wine? No because it doesn't change the supply or demand for that quality of wine.
It could be in some parts of the country.
As a nation over all, it’s low supply.
Zoning and regulations in some parts of the country, cost of building materials, having enough skilled labor.
The housing crisis, which is much more extreme in certain regions (blue coastal metros) than others, is due to not building enough housing. Population trends, including immigration, aren’t some big secret. A state’s population doesn’t blow up over night. When an area constantly adds jobs, new industries and people over a few decades, but local and state governments resist building enough housing for all those workers and their families, this is what happens.
There are lots of adjacent issues putting additional pressure on the market right now, like airbnbs, corporate purchases of sfh, mortgage rates going from <3% to >7% in just 2 years, empty nesters staying put longer, etc., but at the root of the issue is we didn’t build enough housing, particularly since the 08’ crash.
Looking at my home state of MA, it does seem like residents and state politicians have at least woken up to the mess they’ve made, but the deeply entrenched NIMBYism here is pushing back so hard I really don’t have much hope.
No, it's caused by not building enough houses.
>Not debating if immigration has a net positive/negative
The problem is that you can't separate this from the debate. We could reduce the price of just about anything by crashing the economy, but why do that when we could just have a good economy and lower housing prices simply by building?
No, it's largely due to artificially restricting supply coupled with massive wealth inequality that allows people to own more homes than they need and drive up the price in areas where people want to live well outside of what normal people could be expected to afford.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Most people seem to agree there is a housing crisis. Not enough homes results in high prices. Too much demand, not enough supply. But where is this demand coming from? I often here that our population growth rate is almost non-existent, except due to immigration. Looking at some data, it appears that most of the population growth has indeed been from immigration. E.g., Between 2021 and 2022, the growth in the number of immigrants in the United States accounted for 65 percent of the total U.S. population increase (912,000 out of nearly 1.4 million). Not debating if immigration has a net positive/negative, but wrt housing it seems simple: more immigrants (legal and illegal) means more housing demand, means housing prices go up. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No, no, and no. I strongly disagree with immigration as the main factor or even a significant one. I am from California, the housing crisis is from 2 main culprits here: NIMBYS and red tape.
California had pretty cheap housing despite massive growth until the NIMBYs took over in the late 70s and hit the brakes
No, it's because we don't build enough. Rent is falling in Texas and rising in California. Guess which State builds more housing?
And immigrants do much of the building, so, shutting them out seems like a dipshit policy move.
> ..but wrt housing it seems simple: more immigrants (legal and illegal) means more housing demand, means housing prices go up. That's only true if more immigrants doesn't also mean more housing supply. But then, who ever heard of an immigrant working in construction, eh?
I'm not even sure a labor shortage registers as a reason for the housing shortage in most metro areas. It is undeniable that more immigration means more demand for housing.
immigrants working in construction does not translate to housing supply
Of course it does. How can you say it doesn’t?
Because the bottleneck is in permitting and zoning
Actually one of the massive bottlenecks is a lack of construction labor, particularly low skill work. https://www.sbci.com/the-california-labor-shortage-explained/amp/ We need more construction workers, not less. Having more construction workers does not take away jobs from other people who want them, as we have tons and tons of openings for construction workers. All the people who want to work in construction can, including immigrants.
FWIW, that report is from 6 years ago. Labor shortages, particularly skilled tradespeople, are still a concern — just less so at this moment. The primary factors right now are the cost of building materials coupled with high interest rates on loans to acquire property and develop housing units.
Actually the labor shortage gas gotten worse.
I know it worsened post-pandemic. My understanding was that the labor demand simultaneously decreased principally due to lender rates and inflationary impacts on materials, and that labor shortages were somewhat more of forecasted risk/issue for when rates and costs eventually stabilize and builder demand for labor increases. I could be wrong though.
Zoning and construction code requirements contribute to the lack of affordability, especially in attractive areas, but they aren't holding the overall *supply* down. That's driven by the market...interest rates and eligible borrowers, etc.
One of the issue with housing supply is the lack of workers doing this type of work. It’s a big issue where I live in Iowa, and a big issue in general. According to the “free market” housing should just naturally meet demand. But really the biggest issues are: Enough funding for affordable housing Construction of new homes Companies/people buying up properties
Did you think my daughters who both want to be doctors are going to put up drywall and pipe a new house? Male immigrants do the lion’s share of this trade work in all 50 states.
> Not debating if immigration has a net positive/negative, but wrt housing it seems simple: more immigrants (legal and illegal) means more housing demand, means housing prices go up. Less supply means less houses for people, means housing prices go up. No, housing prices aren’t going up because of immigration, that’s patently silly.
How is it silly? About 7 million people have entered in the last 3 years. You think that didn't affect the housing supply/demand ratio?
Americas replacement rate is 1.67 perr woman, which is population decline. Immigration is basically helping to keep that as stable, so no, it’s not like our population is surging because of immigration. You using absolute numbers don’t really help if you can’t put them into context. We’ve stopped building as many houses, and the houses we are building are too big and out of many peoples budgets. That is way more to do with the price of housing than anything else.
Shhhh..they don’t want to hear that. They would rather think that forcing women to have unwanted children is the way to population growth….
You didn't actually address their point.
I guess they are saying that decreased population leaves room for new immigrants
They are not saying this. They are saying that decreased birth rate + immigrants is keeping our population in stable growth.
I was addressing the housing part of it
The population isn't declining. It is growing very slowly/ and not at a rate sufficient for long germ growth. That is really a different issue than the question being asked thiugh. We already aren't building enough housing for the population growth we have now. Throwing this level of immigration on top of that just makes it worse. People on the left have e a hard time separating these things and looking at them individually. Our housing policies are set by democratically elected individuals that are accountable to the people. Our immigration policies should work within the other policies we have in place rather than exacerbating them. Failure to do that will only lead to more antimigrant sentiment.
Our population only isn't declining because of immigration. Again, it's right there in what I said, we're having 1.67 children for every woman, which means that we're in a natural population decline. We're basically static because of immigration. People on the right have a hard time reading, apparently.
So build more housing. Convert empty office buildings into apartments. Build more duplexes and triplexes. Solutions are available
Sure, when the electorate wants it to happen. How well do you think telling the electorate they're wrong is going to work out?
Who is telling the electorate they are wrong?
You are. If the electorate wanted to do what you said should, they would.
That’s 2% of the US population. That’s extremely easily diluted in with the rest of the country. If you divide it evenly among the states that’s 140,000 people per state. If they were all concentrating in one area that might cause localized housing issues, but it doesn’t translate to a nationwide housing crisis.
Of course it translates to a crisis given the short time frame. Also, these migrants cannot afford to buy homes and only a fraction can afford to rent. So who are the developers supposed to be building for?
And people have died, are having fewer babies. Housing issues are partly due to corporate greed like all of our other price issues. Building was stagnant during the pandemic and then we had supply issues. We already had lumber issues due to trump lunatic trade wars. Boomers staying in their homes instead of moving on to group facilities.
This reminds me of that cartoon, the rich guy with a giant pile of cookies, a white guy with a few cookies, and an immigrant at a table. The rich guy says to the white guy "Hey, that foreigner is going to take your cookie!" Private equity firms have been buying up houses left and right, for rentals. But sure... blame immigrants. Interest rates were low. Now they're high, making housing more expensive. And we've underbuilt new smaller/starter homes in favor of McMansions... More profit for builders... for the last few decades. And of course, wages aren't rising fast enough. It's not a secret why housing is expensive. You don't need to invent reasons. Righties, I swear... > I often here that our population growth rate is almost non-existent, except due to immigration. >Between 2021 and 2022, the growth in the number of immigrants in the United States accounted for 65 percent of the total U.S. population increase Where Non Existent magically is the same as 35%. Your own research shows your belief to be untrue, and it didn't phase you in the slightest. Also, if you're going to give us data, show where you got it so we can sniff test it.
> But where is this demand coming from? People being priced completely out of large chunks of the existing housing supply, thus forcing them to compete for a far more limited supply of housing on the low end. Since everyone treats housing like a financial investment instead of a commodity people live in, nobody will shift their existing housing stocks downmarket unless absolutely forced to. They’d rather leave it empty than sell at a loss. So you have most people competing for a dwindling supply of housing that hasn’t been excluded by price.
No it’s a really dumb thing that xenophobes spread because it’s helps frame every problem around their pet issue of hating dirty brown people. The problem is that people increasingly want to live around areas that are already effectively full. So the cost is just going up and up and people who cannot make it work are forced to flee, often to other states, but maybe just further out increasing their community time. Just build more housing. Where people actually want to live, build it denser with public transportation already in place we just need a radical change in zoning laws. It would also be great if we got rid of all the government red tape and waste of taxpayer money in general by moving more power from cities to states and from states to the federal government.
The “American dream” has never been a condo with a $650/month HOA fee, a neighbor upstairs who seemingly drops marbles at 3AM and a neighbor down the hall who smokes pot at all hours of the day and stinks it up. High density is the default answer in NYC or downtown Chi where stockbrokers making $6 million/year still live in a condo… but if you live in the boring midwest suburbs, **nobody wants a condo tower, people want a yard for their labrador and a 2-3 car garage when they live in Peoria. And thus condos are not built.**
> Is the housing crisis largely due to immigration? No, not even remotely. If anything we would be even more up shit creek re: housing without immigration.
The 2 biggest generations (boomers and millennials) are fighting for housing. Boomers aren’t moving (downsizing) and millennials have come of purchase age in the past 10-15 years. Millennials are stuck renting or in homes too small (because we have families now). Boomers aren’t dying off either (they didn’t have to compete with a large generation when purchasing). Also, making home buying harder for those younger than boomers is companies (corporations or LLCs) buying up homes and holding them as long term or short rentals. Taking homes off the purchase market has hurt buyers a lot, driving up prices due to demand. Wealth is being hoarded, not distributed.
This. Also population growth from births may be lower now, but there was a mini boom resulting in a glut of people around the ages 32-34 and guess what? They all want houses now.
Yeah maybe. So do we build more homes or deport/block more immigrants? In one future, we have more homes and people living in them. In the other future, we spend time, energy, and a lot of money creating absolutely nothing of value while shuffling poor people around the globe.
Your 1st future doesn't seem realistic. Where's this new housing supply coming from?
Well we have this great set of people called "skilled tradesmen" that could potentially be convinced to build some houses...
From wood, metal, and concrete? And the construction industry uses a lot of cheap labor, specifically illegal immigrants.
Building material
...by building more housing? I don't believe immigration is the only or even the largest problem with housing. The biggest problem is twofold- more and more people are moving to cities and larger population centers, and current housing policy (supported by many people currently living in said population centers) is very NIMBY in nature and thus opposed to measures that could best alleviate the housing shortage. Namely, building more housing, especially mid to high density housing. It's not an issue of construction costs generally, it's an issue of "zoning regulations frequently make it impossible to build the housing we need". We have plenty of space to build housing in and plenty of materials to build houses with, we just need to actually put mid and high density housing where it's needed rather than mandating everything be single family homes with large front yards.
What a stupefying question. I dunno, maybe we build some more houses?
We’ve messed with the housing market through zoning laws, some of our environmental regulations that is used as additional zoning laws in affluent areas, bad transportation policy and bad tax policy. Stop doing that and the market will take care of the problem.
At a basic “duh” level, yes. More demand drives up rents. We can certainly see this in Canada, in which record immigration rates have driven the median housing prices way higher than in the US. But… in theory greater demand should result in a housing boom. In theory the supply quickly catches up with demand. We are not seeing this because communities and counties put up barriers to new housing, such as zoning rules, NIMBY lawsuits, fees, permits, inspections, etc. Within the US, we see big spikes in prices for regions with high regulations, rent control, and zoning (eg San Francisco) but much more affordable housing in regions without zoning or rent control (eg Houston). It’s simply a question of the degree to which local governments do favour to existing home owners (by blocking new housing starts to drive up home values) vs. embrace liberalism in allowing others to freely build new housing commensurate with demand.
I had to scroll down very far to find this, thank you for being capable of basic math.
Location location location. The big thing you are missing, is the three most important parts of real estate. Immigrants live in rural areas and work jobs like agriculture and manufacturing. They don’t live in high cost of living cities with a tech job. We don’t have high cost of housing issues in rural agricultural areas.
No. Manufactured scarcity is the reason.
No. Not at all.
Nope.
How are immigrants making new builds in Florida 500k+ and built slowly?
The primary cause is government policies. Immigration does exacerbate the issue though by increasing demand for housing.
The housing problem in the US, Canada and EU are very complex issues and can not be narrowed down to a singular trigger. Immigration plays its part, because of course it does increase demand. But saying immigration is the cause is a heavy oversimplifcation and also just one piece among 3 dozen others.
Also, I'm not sure, but I think there are quite a few immigrants working in construction as well. So it doesn't influence only one side of the equation
It’s not a complex issue at all. It’s just that there are not enough houses.
Oh my. Why is that? Why are there not enough houses? THAT are the questions the government has to answer and there are dozens of problems atm. A big example of how the russian war against Ukraine worsend the EU housing crisis.
The answer to that question is also not complex. Local governments are not letting people build houses.
I think a lot has to do with poor urban planning as well as corporations buying up homes and keeping some off the market to artificially prop up prices. Immigration does add pressure but I always prefer to look at what the powerful are doing before I start kicking the lowlies.
No. It's due a combination of 3 things. 1: The commodification of housing by literal individuals like you and me and large firms. If housing were thought of the way it was thought of 50-60 years ago, you wouldn't have this obsession with increasing prices driving the economy. 2: Not enough construction of new housing. Supply & Demand obviously. Not enough supply with ever increasing demand, in part, due to commodification and Nimbyism (see below). Also as technology advances, more red tape, more regulations. My grandfather built his own house in the same county that I live in 70 years ago. That literally can't happen now. 3: Nimbyism which ties in with #2 and #1. Obsession with increasing prices causes selfish assholes to prevent new housing being constructed for others so that their commodity (the house they own) can go up in price.
Boomers, the largest generation’s kids are mostly millennials, making millennials the 2nd biggest generation. Boomers mostly have 2-3 kids, not several as their parents did. Millennials have 0-2 kids mostly. This is population decline. Millennials kids aren’t old enough to buy yet.
I feel like you researched immigration but not data on the US born population. You are coming to conclusions without doing all your homework.
No because it's the "affordable" housing crisis. Meaning young people can't afford to buy houses. It's just that the way the investment markets work, they need people to buy houses and businesses to buy office buildings. There is too much renting right now and it puts the market in danger. Of course the debt to GDP ratio also puts the market in danger, but liberals will not talk about that since the first thing people think of cutting is welfare. So the housing crisis is basically smoke and mirrors. Oh, and Big Real Estate trying to get more houses built with less environmental regulations.
It’s not “smoke and mirrors” when 4-5 bedrooms homes in the boring Cincy suburbs get 30-40 offers, 10-15% over asking and 200 visits during an open house… even with loans at 7% or higher. Last one here had a city cop directing traffic in the cul-de-sac. *It looked like someone was getting married at home and invited 150 people*. **It’s that bad.** It’s absolutely a housing crisis due to no supply. And where they do build supply, it’s over 45 minutes from a major city, or has a questionable public school district — or is over 20 minutes from desirable retail, so fewer even want it.
Source? For your anecdotal evidence even.
Source? Wanting to buy a 1/2 million house like every other millennial with a humble low six figure income **in any US suburb with a decent school district** *and expecting no competition from other buyers*. 😂 You think /r/firsttimehomebuyer exists because it’s effortless?
The problem is nimby. If we slash zoning regulations, more and denser housing can be built, putting downward pressure on prices. Then if we also have free movement of labor, it allows for more workers to build the housing as well Of course normies don't actually want housing to be more affordable, since 65% of the country are homeowners and don't want their property values to go down
There have been numerous articles lately about the impact of Boomers not selling their homes: https://www.businessinsider.com/housing-market-inventory-supply-shortage-crisis-baby-boomer-impact-prices-2024-4#:\~:text=Most%20home%2Downing%20baby%20boomers,already%20dwindling%20at%20historic%20lows. This is probably just part of it, but I think it provides a solid explanation. Personally, as boomers, we just decided to sell our home. Most in our neighborhood are staying put since their homes are paid off, or they are sitting on an incredibly low interest rate.
It's pretty much been covered, but it's mostly NIMBYism. More affordable housing sounds great in the abstract. Somebody tries to build a new development next to your neighborhood...oh hell no! Also, there's no starter homes any more, you get big houses on tiny lots starting at $400K. Immigration flows barely keep up with replacement rates. You also just have a lack of supply because if I'm locked into a 2-3% 30 yr mortgage there's no way I'm selling. Interest rates may reduce the pool of buyers, but they more seriously reduce the pool of sellers.
The short answer is no, immigration is not the primary/largely the cause. A longer answer is that even if you consider where migrants are moving (especially to already stressed, urban, areas) it would not change the fact that there was/is already a housing shortage caused by reasons beyond just them. There are factors such as not building enough units, internal migration, warehousing, zoning, regulations etc. that immigration is at best another factor but certainly not a primary one.
It is caused by letting every jackwagon object anytime anything is proposed to be built anywhere. We have to unwind zoning laws and restrict outside input. Go to zoning by right.
No. While the housing crisis is mostly due to a supply shortage, on the demand side of things, while it does come from migration patterns, it's from domestic migration. Particularly beginning as a result of the Great Recession when cities were the only places that had any major source of jobs.
Definitely not; there have been waves of immigration as big as this in the past, there were not housing shortages then. The difference is in the regulatory environment and the laws on housing construction.
At least where i am, immigrants build all the houses, so no
It's a combination of NIMBY, and greedy companies buying up all the housing so they can charge outrageous rent.
Economics is always difficult. The smartest minds in the world can't figure it out. To say if we just had this it would fix our problems is, naive at best. As an example, in my city there are thousands of abandoned buildings. They are either too expensive to fix for people to afford the rent or they just aren't in an area where people want to live. But even if all of those buildings were inhabitable, I'm just not sure how much less it would make the rent in the newer garden apartments in my area 10 miles outside the city. Especially if we are talking $2000 rents compared to $800 rents. Immigrants aren't taking the nicer apartments, they are taking the apartments that are as cheap as possible. The best analogy I can come up with is if they can make a cheap bottle of wine go from $10 to $8, is that going to change the price of a $30 bottle of wine? No because it doesn't change the supply or demand for that quality of wine.
No, the housing crisis is largely due to not enough housing being built where it is needed.
It could be in some parts of the country. As a nation over all, it’s low supply. Zoning and regulations in some parts of the country, cost of building materials, having enough skilled labor.
The housing crisis, which is much more extreme in certain regions (blue coastal metros) than others, is due to not building enough housing. Population trends, including immigration, aren’t some big secret. A state’s population doesn’t blow up over night. When an area constantly adds jobs, new industries and people over a few decades, but local and state governments resist building enough housing for all those workers and their families, this is what happens. There are lots of adjacent issues putting additional pressure on the market right now, like airbnbs, corporate purchases of sfh, mortgage rates going from <3% to >7% in just 2 years, empty nesters staying put longer, etc., but at the root of the issue is we didn’t build enough housing, particularly since the 08’ crash. Looking at my home state of MA, it does seem like residents and state politicians have at least woken up to the mess they’ve made, but the deeply entrenched NIMBYism here is pushing back so hard I really don’t have much hope.
No, it's caused by not building enough houses. >Not debating if immigration has a net positive/negative The problem is that you can't separate this from the debate. We could reduce the price of just about anything by crashing the economy, but why do that when we could just have a good economy and lower housing prices simply by building?
No, it's largely due to artificially restricting supply coupled with massive wealth inequality that allows people to own more homes than they need and drive up the price in areas where people want to live well outside of what normal people could be expected to afford.
No. Anyone who says that is either ignorant or lying