For context I answered this question on Quora
America has a surplus of food to feed the world over so that isn’t a problem. Housing is another story. We have a 7 million unit affordable housing shortage and migrates will only make that worse as they will inevitable compete for the shrinking number of low income units and even multifamily market rate units available. Even shitlib media has already admitted that migrants have exacerbated the housing crisis because anyone with basic economic literacy could figure it out.
AXIOS: Migrant Surge Makes U.S. Housing Crisis Worse
Yet they continue to hold onto the luxury belief that the U.S. can sustain indefinite population influxes from the rest of the world.
As I noted three years ago in The Case for an Immigration Moratorium illegal migration and immigration both increase metropolitan statistical area rents and house prices in an almost one to one ratio in both urban cores and surrounding suburbs with an even larger spillover effect on prices in adjacent MSAs.
An increase in the number of immigrants equal to 1 percent of an MSA’s total population was linked with a 0.8 percent increase in rents and a 0.8 percent increase in home prices. This same increase in immigrants was associated with a 1.6 percent rise in rents and a 9.6 percent rise in home prices in surrounding MSAs.
A study conducted a decade earlier found an approximately 1:1 ration between immigration inflows equal to 1% of a metro area population and house values and rents. A similar Australian study also found an almost 1:1 ratio between the gain in a postcode’s population due to immigration and housing prices with an estimated $6,500 increase in median house prices per year due to immigration as does most literature examining the impact of migration and immigration on rent and housing prices.
Suburban sprawl peaked in 2005–06, thanks to a housing bubble started during the Clinton Admin, when new housing starts peaked at 2.27 million in January 2006 which according to NYT was a 34 year high not seen since 1972 when the U.S. had the highest number of housing starts in history. We are dealing with record high illegal migration and immigration with less than 60% of the housing starts we had at the peak of new home construction this century when there were 40 million fewer people in this country. This is not a sustainable trend and insisting that home construction will just magically match outside population pressures once interest rates are lowered is historically illiterate and nothing more than wishful thinking. 1972 mortgage interest rates were higher than current mortgage interest rates are as were income taxes on middle class households and for most of the 80s median mortgage interest sat in the double digit ranges without inducing a housing shortage. Cost of acquiring land is astronomically higher than it was in the 70s, 80s, 90s or early 2000s. The cost of constructing new housing is 30–40% higher than it was in 2019. Moody Analytics July 2024 report on Housing notes for land costs in particular:
The most significant impediment to building more affordable housing is the availability and cost of land. There simply is not enough build able land to meet the demand in many areas, and the costs associated with securing and developing the land that is available too often push builders’ total costs above what they could get from the sale of an affordable property. The cost of land has soared to an estimated over half of the total price of the median-priced home nationwide and to more than two-thirds of the house price in high-opportunity areas such as Seattle and San Francisco.
This was based on estimate residential land values across thousands of counties provided by the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Despite delusions to the contrary the U.S. does not have unlimited land to sprawl over to accommodate an indefinite population influx from the third world. Despite having the 4th largest land mass in the world the land area where job opportunities are being created to accommodate population growth are a fraction of that and shrinking. 97% of our country’s land mass is rural; job opportunities in rural areas are scarce and will only become scarcer in the future. Agriculture has been almost completely automated and will only become more automated in the future making migrant workers that do seasonal fruit picking redundant and the manufacturing jobs that once were a mainstay of rural job markets have either been outsourced or automated as well. Urban and Suburban land is what 99% of future generations have left to compete for and most of it has already been carved out of new development by past generations.