> It's REITs buying up housing for rental that drives up the pricing
Almost certainly not. Institutional investors are too little of the market. And every time someone has seriously investigated this hypothesis, the evidence has been lacking.
Sure but labor only accounts for a fraction of the cost of housing and that only goes down as we automate more of the process. Even traditional house are now frequently assembled out of prefabricated sections.
Mass self deportation is a fairly easy solution too. It’d cause an immediate glut of homes and jobs. It would also cause economic shock, but that would by and large hurt the capital class. We are in for pain either way, might as well ensure the next generations have ample opportunity.
Cut back/tax on legal immigration, tax remittances harder, and penalize those employing illegal immigrants. None of this ICE kabuki theatre is needed (and frankly is cruel and immoral).
Obviously this won’t happen because both left & right want immigration.
> What inventory of housing do you think you will unlock when migrants leave?
For legal migrants, many of them are in respectable homes. For the illegal yes it’s lower quality, but regardless supply and demand will hold true. Safety in many of these lower quality homes will increase as well.
> The jobs they hold are available to you today. No one wants farm wages.
Because we’ve allowed capital to increase their bottom line at the expense of labor. The conditions and pay today are only what they are because we let capital play by different rules. We should not structure America to benefit the few.
That's not how it works. Housing prices are not allowed to go down, because a massive chunk of Boomer equity is bound up in them. If there's ever a danger of housing prices going down, bailouts will be issued and supply tightened until the "natural" state of things is restored and they go up again.
All the shitty covenants they put in much/most of even the shittiest of wasteland around me still exist though.
There was one piece of absolute shithole land I looked at because I was in the process of building a house.
Some dead guy decided to encumber it by requiring me to build a gigantic house if I wanted live there. Reversing it would require something as onerous roughly as getting all people in a 10 mile radius to stand on one foot while reciting the entire bible from memory. Technically possible so it holds up in court as not being a perpetual covenant, but for all intent in purposes was.
You would not believe how much land boomers basically ruined forever when they mindlessly engaged in some wack covenants back around the 80s.
Every settlement reaches a level of density where they have to re-reckon with land use rules collectively — that’s one of the deep flaws in a primarily private approach to land however appealing (and definitely particularly popular in boomer heydays).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the... - Look at the 60 and older groupings. Those are boomers and older generations. The youngest boomers are about 60, so 15 years average remaining for them but potentially 20-30 more years of boomers as a significant percentage of the population.
Not in California unfortunately, where Prop 13 has strong tax incentives to keep retirees in their existing home until death, even if it's far larger than what they need.
