By Jazz Shaw
HotAir.com, August 10, 2019
https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2019/08/10/mississippi-employers-willfully-hired-illegals-prosecuted/
IT IS NOT AN ACCIDENT WE HAVE OPEN
BORDERS AND NON-ENFORCEMENT! IT IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND PROFITS HIGHER
FOR A FEW!
“For
example, it would take an individual earning the median income 43 years to save
up enough for a down payment in Los Angeles—and that’s not a down payment for a
McMansion, it’s for a median-priced dwelling. In San Francisco, it would take
that individual 40 years. In New York City or Miami, it would take 36 years.”
Millennial
homelessness and unaffordable housing are some of the biggest problems facing
America—but no one is willing to speak frankly about it.
The cheap-labor economic strategy
also pushes Americans
away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans,
including many who are now struggling with
fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and
wealth from the heartland to
the coastal cities, explodes rents
and housing costs, shrivels real
estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating
low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
Homeownership rates only tell half the
story.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/15/how-immigration-made-14-million-millennials-homeless/
Imagine a homeless man. Does he have a long,
frazzled beard and unkempt hair? What do his clothes look like? Probably ratty
and full of holes—moth nests in the pockets. Maybe he has a shopping cart full
of cans and a mangy dog named “Rusty.”
Although culturally ubiquitous, this
characterization of the grizzled old hobo is profoundly misleading. In reality,
most of America’s homeless people are young and healthy. Many attended college
and work full-time jobs. They usually have permanent mailing addresses. Who are
these people? Millennials.
Estimates suggest that 14 million Millennials
still reside in their childhood homes. Why? Some prefer to live at home while
they attend college. Others are lazy. But most cannot move
out because rents are too high and houses too expensive. They are literally
homeless—and millions would also be unsheltered were
it not for their parent’s generosity.
How did it get to the point where an
entire generation of Americans cannot afford to live where they were born and
raised? Where millions must choose between remaining wards of their parents or
leaving their friends and families behind in search of affordable
accommodation—effectively becoming refugees in their own land?
One word: immigration.
Apples to Apples
The overwhelming majority (88
percent) of Millennials say they want to buy a
home. Yet, just 4 percent believe they will be able to so in the coming year.
Why? They cannot afford it: 72 percent say they cannot afford a home mortgage,
while 62 percent say that the down payment is the biggest hurdle. This despair
is reflected in generational homeownership rates.
Currently, 32.2
percent of Millennials own homes, compared
to 60.4 percent of Gen-Xers and 75 percent of Baby Boomers. This alone is
unsurprising: Millennials are younger and thus have had less time to save. But
what’s interesting—and alarming—is that Millennial homeownership rates are far
lower even when correcting for age differences.
For example, 45.4 percent of Gen-Xers
owned homes when they were 25 to 34, as did 45 percent of Boomers.
Meanwhile, the Millennial homeownership
rate for this age group is just 37 percent. In short, Millennials are 8 percent
less likely to own a home than were their parents and grandparents at the same
age.
While this may not sound like much, we
must remember that Millennial homeownership rates are buoyed by banks (at the
government’s behest) who offer effectively negative interest rates on
mortgages—they literally pay Millennials to buy homes. If Millennials needed to
pay the 10 percent interest that Boomers “enjoyed,” I suspect their
homeownership rate would drop precipitously.
On top of this, Millennials are also far
less likely to rent than were previous generations. As such, homeownership
rates only tell half the story of Millennial dispossession.
Boiling the Frog
Although Millennials clearly want to buy
homes, they cannot. Why? Houses are too expensive.
In 1973 the median household income was
$9,265, whereas the median
sales price of a new home in January, 1973, was
$29,900—3.2 times the median household income. In other words, if the median
family saved up every penny and put it towards a new home, it would take just
over three years to buy a brand-new house.
This is in stark contrast to current
prices. In January 2017, the median sales price for a new home was $317,400.
This is 5.6 times the median household income of $56,516. In short, houses are
73 percent more expensive today (in real terms) than they were in 1973. This
is the primary reason why disposable income has actually declined in America
since the 1970s—not just for Millennials, but for all Americans.
Furthermore, it was easier for previous
generations to save money for a down payment. Consider that the rate of return
on a 10-year Treasury Bill in 1973 was 6.46 percent. Today, the rate is just
1.72 percent. Lower interest rates, combined with the fact that the price of
shelter is increasing faster than inflation, is impoverishing our people.
Lastly, housing prices have not increased
uniformly across the nation. In fact, they have actually decreased in those vast swathes of America
which have suffered globalization-driven economic
collapses. Thus, housing and rental prices have increased by much more than
73 percent in areas where Americans can actually find work.
For example, it would take an individual
earning the median income 43 years to save up enough for a down payment in Los
Angeles—and that’s not a down payment for a McMansion, it’s for a median-priced
dwelling. In San Francisco, it would take that individual 40 years. In New York
City or Miami, it would take 36 years.
Clearly, the Millennial generation has
been dispossessed by high housing and rental prices.
The Source of the Nile
Since 1965, more than 45
million people have immigrated legally to America.
During the same period, at least 20
million illegal migrants settled in America. Millions more arrive
every year.
The scale of this mass migration is
unprecedented in human history, and its consequences are not fully understood.
But one thing we do know is that migration drives-up housing prices. How?
Migrants provide virtually unlimited
demand for housing. This basic problem is compounded by two issues. First, the
housing supply is relatively inelastic because as it takes much longer to build
a home than to inhabit one.
Second, housing is a relatively scarce
commodity since there is only a finite quantity of desirable land. Consider
that the vast majority of immigrants settle in a select few metropolitan areas.
Further, immigrants usually settle in areas already populated by their
diaspora—they self-segregate, and in doing so cluster in relatively small areas
which are not able to absorb or disperse their economic impact.
For example, California alone is home to
more than 10
million immigrants. This works out to 26
percent of the state’s population. Meanwhile, immigrants comprise 22.9 percent
of New York state. This explains why 17 of 25 of America’s least
affordable housing markets are in California and six are in New
York.
A number of academic studies demonstrate
that immigration indeed raises housing prices and rents. Libertad
Gonzalez and Francesc Ortega in a 2013 study found that
immigration into Spain caused 52 percent of the overall increase in Spain’s
real estate market.
Another paper published in 2012 by
Canadian researchers Ather
Akbari and Yigit Aydede found that immigration raised
housing and rent prices in Vancouver, although the effect was not large. The
authors postulated that the unexpected minor impact may be due to native
residents leaving neighborhoods with high immigrant rates—“white flight.”
Abeba
Mussa, Uwaoma G. Nwaogub, and Susan Pozoc tested
this theory in a 2017 paper. Their findings were startling: for every 1 percent
that immigration increased the population in a metropolitan statistical area
(“MSA”), rents in that area increased by 0.8 percent. Additionally, domestic
out-migration caused rents in neighboring MSAs to increase by 1.6 percent on
average.
This effect was magnified when looking at
housing prices: housing prices increased by 0.8 percent for every 1 percent
immigrant-driven rise in population in the destination MSA, but by a whopping 9.6 percent in surrounding MSAs. In
this way, immigration not only raised rents and house prices, it primarily
raised them for native-born Americans!
Captive in Babylon
Millennial homelessness and unaffordable
housing are some of the biggest problems facing America—but no one is willing
to speak frankly about it.
The Left acknowledges that rents are “too
damn high.” But because immigration is their Golden Calf they are only willing
to entertain cosmetic “solutions” like rent control—solutions which have
harmful iatrogenic
effects.
The Right usually ignores the problem. If
a solution is offered it invariably takes one of two forms. First, Millennials
are told to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” This is obviously
unhelpful advice: Millennials are drowning in a sea of 65 million immigrants
and their 30 million children. Further, a large fraction of America’s
blue-collar jobs has been shipped
to China and Mexico.
There was a time in America when a high
school graduate could get a job that paid enough to allow him to buy a house
and support a stay-at-home wife and three children. This is impossible today.
In fact, I know many young lawyers who
cannot even afford to buy an apartment—much less have children. In essence,
Millennials are all out of bootstraps.
The second “solution” is for Millennials
to move to cheaper locations—to leave the dead-end town where they were born
and seek prosperity in the wide world. This is not only stupid, it’s immoral.
To begin with, housing is cheap for a
reason—usually, because the neighborhood is infested with degenerates or the
economy is toast. Who cares if you can afford a home if you risk getting
shivved in your driveway? Who cares if the rent is cheap if you can’t find
work?
Beyond that, telling Millennials they need
to move away from their place of birth is immoral.
People are not merely individual
consumers. They are part of something far greater. They are members of a
family, a community, and a nation. What does it profit America to separate sons
from their fathers and infants from their ancestors’ graves—to uproot an entire
generation—to steal from our youth their sense of home and belonging, and
replace it with restless anomie?
Immigration is raising housing prices. The
solution to this problem is not to
further atomize America by encouraging a mass exodus of Millennials from their
hometowns in search of cheaper rents. The solution is to cut the immigration
rate and enforce existing deportation laws.
The solution is to put Americans—and America—first.
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