[cryptonector]

> Higher prices? Immigration! (never mind that immigrants are cheap labor, which should lower prices).

One argument I often see is that housing costs are increased by the large increase in population. Can you speak to that?

Can you imagine a rate that might be too high? 1 million/year? 10 m/y? 20 m/y? 50 m/y? There must be a limit, even for you.

[consteval]

They aren't buying houses, they're very poor.

The housing crisis is caused primarily by middle class and rich domestic white people. The problem is we're not building affordable housing, the reason being housing is the primary and most effective investment for the middle class. People who already own property have the highest incentive imaginable to NOT build more housing. Affordable housing means your investment depreciates.

[thehappypm]

No, the housing crisis is caused by an imbalance of supply and demand.

Immigration (legal or otherwise) increases demand for housing. Your argument that immigrants are poor doesn’t change that, immigrants still live somewhere, and that drives the demand for housing up.

Increasing the housing supply is a solution, but allowing demand to increase is also exacerbating the issue

[consteval]

Yes, that's what I said. Housing isn't being built due to low supply - and immigrants actually RAISE the supply, not lower it, because they are cheap labor.

Demand has not been the issue nor is it solvable. You can't make people go away, you can only increase housing (supply).

We're not increasing supply enough because domestic Americans are greedy. We've set the incentives up in such a way to maximize the amount of friction to building new houses. Nobody with a house wants more homes built.

[thehappypm]

“Immigrants raise supply” would only be true if each immigrant on average created more housing units than they consume, which is demonstrably false.

[consteval]

The math isn't this simple, because immigrants are willing to work jobs domestic people won't, and they're willing to do it for a low wage. Sometimes, even a wage below the federal minimum.

But even past that, what I'm saying isn't "demonstrably false". I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.

Suppose I work for a contractor, and it typically takes a crew of 20 to build a house. I'm being incredibly generous to your argument here, because in the neighborhoods I've seen it's done with 5 people. But suppose 20.

I would only need to be involved in 21 jobs across my career to produce more than I've used. Really, it's even less than that, because homes house multiple people.

To me, that not only seems achievable, that seems obvious.

This is a misunderstanding of the US housing crisis. The problem with housing in the US is that it's an investment, so there's a real cost to Americans when it comes to building affordable housing. That's why nobody would do it - it's bad for the people with capital, and the people with capital matter more. The people with hypothetical future capital don't matter much.

[thehappypm]

Number of new housing units built in 2023: 1.36M

Net change in the amount of known immigrants who live in the US in 2023: 1.6M

% of immigrant workers in construction, natural resources, and maintenance industries in 2023: 14%

If we can generously attribute that 14% of the new housing supply is because of the immigrant labor force, then that’s 190k housing units attributable, to house an increased population of 1.6M.

[cryptonector]

> They aren't buying houses, they're very poor.

I'm sure you've heard of renting. It doesn't matter whether the people seeking housing can buy or only rent -- either way if there's more demand than supply, costs must go up. I wrote "housing costs" earlier rather than "prices" precisely because of this. I'm rather shocked that you ignored rent in your reply.

[consteval]

I didn't ignore rent, rather I did not fall into the intellectually lazy trap of blaming whatever poor and exploited minority of the day for economic struggles.

I'll say it again - new housing isn't being built to keep up because domestic people, that means you and me, do not want it to be built. New housing is purposefully limited by local governments in order to preserve the value of existing housing.

In most cities it's illegal to build more than one unit on a lot. You also typically require a special approval process to build apartments. If you look at the states, HUGE cities will often approve only half a dozen or so new apartments a year. Duplexes, triplexes, dingbats, townhomes - these are straight up illegal in most of the country.

You can't have a city that gets ~100 new units a year and expect prices NOT to go up.

If you want an example of what to do right, look at Austin Texas. Austin built 100,000+ new units in the past couple years and average rent actually decreased ~10% between 2023 and 2024. Yes, you heard that correctly - decreased.

The reason why this works should be obvious, but Americans suffer such severe cognitive dissonance around housing they refuse to admit it. They'd rather blame random poor brown people. We require more housing, particularly dense affordable housing. And yes, that includes in your neighborhood. The sooner people admit this reality the sooner we can fix the housing crisis.