[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.

[consteval]

Again, you're simply blaming the wrong people because it's easy and intellectually lazy.

New housing isn't being built not because we don't have the workforce. That is not the limiting factor on new housing.

New housing isn't being built because local governments DO NOT APPROVE new housing. They purposefully limit it, because the residents do not want their investments to go down in value. They go so far as to put laws in place to prevent affordable housing being built altogether. In many cities, you can't even put more than 1 unit on a lot and you need a special approval process to build apartments. Duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, dingbats - these are straight up illegal to build in a most areas.

[thehappypm]

I am talking about DEMAND. Immigrants increase demand more than they increase supply. End of argument.