Here's an opinion article that the current ongoing migrant crisis is going to make the U.S. housing crisis worse. There already is not enough affordable housing in big U.S. cities. These migrants are going to end up taking the scarce affordable housing which still exists, which is going to end up resulting in the poorest Americans being kicked out into the streets. Or maybe they will have to move far away from everything and everyone they have ever known. Migrant surge makes U.S. housing crisis worse, Caitlin Owens, Axios, September 23, 2023 - Homelessness in the U.S. had a record spike from 2022 to 2023 - Now, state and local officials are also scrambling to house thousands of migrants arriving from the border. Chicago homeless advocates estimate the city has more than 68,000 unhoused people, in addition to nearly 9,500 migrants. City officials tell Axios they expect migrant support efforts to cost more than a quarter of a billion dollars this year. Local advocates say that's more than they've ever seen deployed toward the local homeless population.
Democrats are counting on all of these illegals to receive amnesty in the future and vote Democrat so they come first and are more important than American citizens
As I explained in another thread, in economics, when the demand curve is steep enough at a certain point (or short interval), you don't get the normal tapering off of demand like is typically seen with a supply and demand curves. Instead you can get a shortage -- and I mean a real economic shortage. Where price is no longer the major factor in the allocation of scarce supply. Basically you have a large number of people who all struggle to afford paying more than a certain price. So despite the excess of people relative to the supply, there is a limited ability for a segment of this group to be able to outbid the rest of the group. And when it comes to things like renting, tiny increases in price are less of a factor to the landlord than other factors, such as trustworthiness, knowing that the tenant won't cause damage to the property, credit-worthiness, knowing that the tenant is actually going to pay (considering that there exist various laws which may prevent and delay eviction). There can even be an element of randomness in rental allocation, first-come, first-served; if all the applicants are seen as nearly the same, the landlord may just find it easier to rent out to the first applicants that apply. The "conventional" thought in economics is that shortages cannot truly exist in a free market, with supply and demand. But as I have just explained, that's not really always true.
I know you are being facetious and sarcastic, but many of those on the Left will blame capitalism, no matter how much evidence is staring them in the face to the contrary. The capitalist system only operates withing certain constraints, and those constraints can only be pushed so far before there becomes a problem and the system can no longer continue adequately functioning. One of those constraints is the balance of labor supply to labor demand. If it becomes tipped too far in one direction, workers will lose leverage. But the issue in this case is housing supply, a different but in some ways similar issue. A lot of the better job opportunities in the U.S. seem to be concentrated into a handful of limited areas, and those areas naturally have much higher population densities and more expensive housing prices, because not enough housing exists for everyone who would otherwise desire to live there. One of the main issues are that there is a shortage of available open space to build on in the desirable areas that are already filled up. It could be possible to squeeze more people in, but that would cause problems too, and eliminate the last remaining areas of open space, which would not be good for the people living there. Overcrowding is the problem. And despite what many people seem to think, it's too expensive and economically impractical to build upward. (You don't see the private sector using that strategy very often, unless it involves luxury condos) If the U.S. is going to bring in more people, whole new cities will have to be built, in areas where cities do not currently exist. But that is something that has not been happening in the U.S. in a 100 years. Part of the issue is that there is not money or any intrinsic economic driving force to build new cities, no reason for the persons with money to relocate to smaller towns. The last two major cities in the U.S. were built in 1911 and 1914, Las Vegas and Anchorage (Alaska). Before that, Miami in 1896.
I get it, but the progressives seem to have no conceptual understanding of unintended consequences. They blame capitalism for wage rates being stagnate, while they claim we need more and more foreign workers because employers can't get any workers at the wages they want to pay. It's crazy...
