I appreciate the measured and reasonable response, in the current climate! Thank you for clarifying your point - I’m glad you brought up Australia, as well, because I used to live there and I remember how bloody unaffordable it was even back then. In Australia, “negative gearing” is a rule that allows you to write off losses from real estate on other investments (https://www.businessthink.unsw.edu.au/articles/australia-housing-affordability-crisis-negative-gearing). So, your family trust has a nice big house which could rent for reasonable amount of money, but you leave it empty and write off the “lost rent” against your stock market investments, or other properties which are doing well, etc… meanwhile, you have a fully paid-off (and depreciating!) asset on your books which you can, if you need to, use as collateral for a loan against another project, or sell off if you need a big, quick injection of cash. As a result, nobody’s got incentive to sell, which coincidentally drives the price of those held assets higher and gives property owners even less incentive to sell.
Edit: I will say that growing the population through immigration will increase the number of labourers available to build new inventory, and open and staff new factories producing building materials etc, which will increase affordability either by bringing down prices or generally stimulating and growing the economy so everyone’s richer - but there’s no need for that growth to be unsustainable in nature, or continue forever. Even if that is the historical standard we’re working from 🙄
It sounds like we generally agree that there are structural reasons quite aside from population growth, and agree that they desperately need to be addressed (i.e. regulatory). I’m arguing from the perspective that we should absolutely attempt to address these reasons, but that ANY population growth from any source is essentially adding fuel to the fire.
I think a lot of emphasis gets put on “supply-side” solutions that sound a lot like “just build more houses, NBD!”. From what I’ve observed we can’t get there with the existing land without (IMO) excessive densification and/or sprawl which has an easily-felt deleterious effect on livability. I’ve spent the last couple of decades living in very different places, and watched them change due to growth. In all cases growth has caused traffic that never existed before, MASSIVE crowding of local attractions that can’t be mitigated without restrictive permitting, and astronomical increases in the price of real estate. Without being hyperbolic at all, more population has quite literally been felt as less freedom. Some of this is due to the rise of the global middle class, but they have their hands in my home places at the expense of locals, and it’s gone from great to hellish in about 20-30 years.
The problems with new housing seem to be:
limited/no affordable land available in places where people have historically lived (and which have jobs, nice weather, natural attractions, etc)
materials are at a premium due to increased global demand (and, admittedly the pandemic)
Local first-world labor has never been more expensive - labor doesn’t scale like computing and related tech
densification in the form of attached dwellings on small land parcels, and no/fewer personal vehicles is a large decrease in QOL compared to the historic “American dream”
Like if you think you can find 10 million people to give up LA/Seattle/NY/etc and move to central Kansas, where there’s no ocean, no mountains, no lakes, no jobs, and nothing to do, more power to you. People live in interesting places for good reasons, and other places are cheap for good reasons.
An adjacent point: nature abhors a vacuum. If the QOL is better in the US and there are ~8 billion possible candidates for immigration, our population could easily double in a month. The demand is there. We could adopt a policy of open borders until QOL reaches equilibrium at some much lower level and immigration stops - we could also make immigration virtually impossible - or anything in-between. I’m of the opinion that lower influx means > QOL pretty close to 100% of the time.
EDIT: tl;dr - more individuals translates to reduced individual freedom. I’m not going to get weird and libertarian about it, but that’s the relationship I observe.
You wouldn’t be wrong if it were a purely numerical game, but it’s not. You might not be wrong if I were advocating for entirely open borders with minimal to no immigration process, but I’m not. I’m saying that the US needs to stop making it so damn difficult to come here, and to offer more respect to the people that choose to come here. Immigration’s effect on the economy, throughout the history of the US, has been overall a positive one: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-effects-of-immigration-on-the-united-states-economy
Many hands make light work. More labourers means more labour wages, means more money flying around the economy, means more available and cheaper products and services for everyone - this includes housing stock. I don’t believe that densification automatically equals lower quality of life, or that more individuals automatically equals fewer individual freedoms. Those statements seem to be the crux of your argument, but they look like flawed premises to me, so data to support them is required.
This is all quite aside from the fact that right here, right now, we’re talking about asylum seekers. This is a humanitarian issue, and the number of people actually seeking asylum is a relative drop in the bucket to the overall population. Asylum seekers alone won’t double anyone’s population; they’ll barely even move the needle, from 333 million to 334 million in the case of the US.
I appreciate the measured and reasonable response, in the current climate! Thank you for clarifying your point - I’m glad you brought up Australia, as well, because I used to live there and I remember how bloody unaffordable it was even back then. In Australia, “negative gearing” is a rule that allows you to write off losses from real estate on other investments (https://www.businessthink.unsw.edu.au/articles/australia-housing-affordability-crisis-negative-gearing). So, your family trust has a nice big house which could rent for reasonable amount of money, but you leave it empty and write off the “lost rent” against your stock market investments, or other properties which are doing well, etc… meanwhile, you have a fully paid-off (and depreciating!) asset on your books which you can, if you need to, use as collateral for a loan against another project, or sell off if you need a big, quick injection of cash. As a result, nobody’s got incentive to sell, which coincidentally drives the price of those held assets higher and gives property owners even less incentive to sell.
Building new inventory to counter the impacts of policies like these has slowed almost everywhere thanks to manufacture and supply chain disruptions (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/06/16/new-houses-longer-build-housing-labor-shortages/7572802001/ - warning, autoplaying video, but at least it’s muted I guess). In addition to that, Australia (https://www.afr.com/property/commercial/china-tops-the-list-of-foreign-buyers-of-housing-20230309-p5cqrn) and Canada (https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/01/business/canada-bans-home-purchases-foreigners/index.html) have shared a problem with foreign investors mostly from mainland China buying up property and driving up prices. There are a few reasons those investors might be motivated to purchase foreign property, but I’ve got stuff to do this evening so I’ll leave the research up to you if you’re curious :P
Edit: I will say that growing the population through immigration will increase the number of labourers available to build new inventory, and open and staff new factories producing building materials etc, which will increase affordability either by bringing down prices or generally stimulating and growing the economy so everyone’s richer - but there’s no need for that growth to be unsustainable in nature, or continue forever. Even if that is the historical standard we’re working from 🙄
It sounds like we generally agree that there are structural reasons quite aside from population growth, and agree that they desperately need to be addressed (i.e. regulatory). I’m arguing from the perspective that we should absolutely attempt to address these reasons, but that ANY population growth from any source is essentially adding fuel to the fire.
I think a lot of emphasis gets put on “supply-side” solutions that sound a lot like “just build more houses, NBD!”. From what I’ve observed we can’t get there with the existing land without (IMO) excessive densification and/or sprawl which has an easily-felt deleterious effect on livability. I’ve spent the last couple of decades living in very different places, and watched them change due to growth. In all cases growth has caused traffic that never existed before, MASSIVE crowding of local attractions that can’t be mitigated without restrictive permitting, and astronomical increases in the price of real estate. Without being hyperbolic at all, more population has quite literally been felt as less freedom. Some of this is due to the rise of the global middle class, but they have their hands in my home places at the expense of locals, and it’s gone from great to hellish in about 20-30 years.
The problems with new housing seem to be:
Like if you think you can find 10 million people to give up LA/Seattle/NY/etc and move to central Kansas, where there’s no ocean, no mountains, no lakes, no jobs, and nothing to do, more power to you. People live in interesting places for good reasons, and other places are cheap for good reasons.
An adjacent point: nature abhors a vacuum. If the QOL is better in the US and there are ~8 billion possible candidates for immigration, our population could easily double in a month. The demand is there. We could adopt a policy of open borders until QOL reaches equilibrium at some much lower level and immigration stops - we could also make immigration virtually impossible - or anything in-between. I’m of the opinion that lower influx means > QOL pretty close to 100% of the time.
EDIT: tl;dr - more individuals translates to reduced individual freedom. I’m not going to get weird and libertarian about it, but that’s the relationship I observe.
You wouldn’t be wrong if it were a purely numerical game, but it’s not. You might not be wrong if I were advocating for entirely open borders with minimal to no immigration process, but I’m not. I’m saying that the US needs to stop making it so damn difficult to come here, and to offer more respect to the people that choose to come here. Immigration’s effect on the economy, throughout the history of the US, has been overall a positive one: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-effects-of-immigration-on-the-united-states-economy
Many hands make light work. More labourers means more labour wages, means more money flying around the economy, means more available and cheaper products and services for everyone - this includes housing stock. I don’t believe that densification automatically equals lower quality of life, or that more individuals automatically equals fewer individual freedoms. Those statements seem to be the crux of your argument, but they look like flawed premises to me, so data to support them is required.
This is all quite aside from the fact that right here, right now, we’re talking about asylum seekers. This is a humanitarian issue, and the number of people actually seeking asylum is a relative drop in the bucket to the overall population. Asylum seekers alone won’t double anyone’s population; they’ll barely even move the needle, from 333 million to 334 million in the case of the US.