Ohio Senator J.D. Vance is Trump's pick for Vice President nominee, in the 2024 election. J.D. Vance says deporting 20 million people is part of the solution to high housing costs In a tweet responding to the allegation that conservatives have few plans to address rising housing costs, Vance argued that cracking down on immigration would go a long way. "Not having 20 million illegal aliens who need to be housed (often at public expense) will absolutely make housing more affordable for American citizens," Vance wrote on X in June. A Trump campaign press secretary recently told NPR the "unstainable invasion of illegal aliens" is "driving up housing costs." In the past, Vance has also blamed the housing affordability crisis on high interest rates. "The thing about the affordable housing crisis is, it is fundamentally a function of higher rents, higher mortgage payments, which are dependent on interest rates," he told a reporter last year. Some economists disagree, claiming deporting millions of people and restricting new immigration would increase prices by reducing the labor force. JD Vance says deporting 20 million people is part of the solution to high housing costs, by Eliza Relman, Business Insider, July 17, 2024 Is J.D. Vance correct? Would deporting 20 million migrants play in part to help ease the housing shortage crisis in the U.S.? related thread: Trump: Biden's Mass Migration Is Skyrocketing Rents, Housing Costs (moved to 'Elections & Campaigns', June 8, 2024 )
Immigrants are not the only reason for housing price increases, but if you build a million and a half new units a year, and import 2 and a half million people, that's going to have an effect.
Also, if we look at the housing market in the U.S. right now, there almost seems to be an oversupply of newer homes, but still a severe shortage of the older homes. Apparently there are many people who really don't want to buy those newer homes being recently built, for various reasons (including factors of price, lot size, geographic location, maybe built to close to noisy freeways because that was the last remaining land space in that city available to build on). There appears to be something about most of these newer homes that is significantly different from the average older home (built 30 or 40 years ago). This suggests to me that solving the housing crisis isn't just a simple solution of "building more homes". another thread: Surplus of new homes, but still a shortage of older homes (2024) (in Economics & Trade, July 9, 2024)
Question - how much is this going to cost the USA citizens? The UK just had a spectacular failure with the plan to ship people to Rwanda https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/01/rwanda-plan-uk-asylum-seeker-cost-figures
However maybe the path is the same as what is being proposed here - tax those who have properties that are unoccupied for the majority of the year
I would think that would lead to a decline in prices of those homes, which at a certain point would attract buyers.
There will presumably eventually be buyers, it will just take much longer to sell. In the mean time, developers are probably going to take note of what's happening in the market and cut back on the construction of new "multifamily dwellings". The thing is, even though there is a dire housing shortage, these new homes are not cheap (nor are they really affordable), and many people don't want to pay that level of money for what they would be getting - almost no yard space in many cases, with many of these newer homes being squeezed right next to each other. When prices drop only a little bit, that will cut into profit margins, and many of these developers probably would never have undertaken the project in the first place if they knew the profit margins were going to end up being at that level.
