Mostly to avoid having infrastructure and social safety networks overwhelmed. Yes, you will also see wages be depressed by large-scale immigration, but that’s something that could–in theory–be controlled by strengthening unions and labor regulations. That’s not where we are though; right now, unions and labor regulations are fairly weak, and are being gutted by courts even as the NLRB tries to strengthen them.
Housing takes time to build, and good city planning is necessary to ensure that cities are sustainable rather than being sprawls. (Not many cities do that, BTW; it’s usually, “oh, we’ll just add another lane to the existing 20 lane interstate”). Given that we’re currently in a situation where there’s insufficient low- and middle-income high density housing, and few companies are willing to build any more, competition for most of the immigrants that we’re seeing–people that are trying to get away from deep economic woes–would be fierce for housing.
I don’t think this is actually true. At least in my area, developers would LOVE to build condos and apartments all over the place, but local laws are holding them back.
I suppose even in a perfectly willing area that upgrades its infrastructure to support more people, you don’t want to move people in too quickly, before that infrastructure is available. But it’s easy to see that become a self fulfilling prophecy: we don’t take immigrants because we don’t have the infrastructure, and we don’t build the infrastructure because there’s no demand for it.
Immigrants would be better served by unprofitable low income housing, not feeding their meager scraps to pay artificially inflated rent prices to an offshore real estate investment company.
Mostly to avoid having infrastructure and social safety networks overwhelmed. Yes, you will also see wages be depressed by large-scale immigration, but that’s something that could–in theory–be controlled by strengthening unions and labor regulations. That’s not where we are though; right now, unions and labor regulations are fairly weak, and are being gutted by courts even as the NLRB tries to strengthen them.
Housing takes time to build, and good city planning is necessary to ensure that cities are sustainable rather than being sprawls. (Not many cities do that, BTW; it’s usually, “oh, we’ll just add another lane to the existing 20 lane interstate”). Given that we’re currently in a situation where there’s insufficient low- and middle-income high density housing, and few companies are willing to build any more, competition for most of the immigrants that we’re seeing–people that are trying to get away from deep economic woes–would be fierce for housing.
I don’t think this is actually true. At least in my area, developers would LOVE to build condos and apartments all over the place, but local laws are holding them back.
I suppose even in a perfectly willing area that upgrades its infrastructure to support more people, you don’t want to move people in too quickly, before that infrastructure is available. But it’s easy to see that become a self fulfilling prophecy: we don’t take immigrants because we don’t have the infrastructure, and we don’t build the infrastructure because there’s no demand for it.
I don’t think anyone wants to make a brand new condo and try to full it full of fresh immigrants that other businesses are exploiting to pay less.
They want to develop 1 set of condos they can sell for $300k+ rather than 3 sets for $100k
Yeah, immigrants would be better served by apartments
No. No, that’s not it at all.
Immigrants would be better served by unprofitable low income housing, not feeding their meager scraps to pay artificially inflated rent prices to an offshore real estate investment company.
Well duh. In fact, they’d be better served by FREE housing!
In the realm of realistic solutions, apartments.
Fun fact! My coworker pays more in rent for his apartment than I do on the mortgage of my house. Most often this is true.
I’m getting a once over by the bank, he’s getting done once over by the bank and again by his landlord, and they might not ever be different.
So how is an immigrant supposed to thrive when a foreign investment firm is profiting off them twice?
Subsidize affordable housing, tax wholesale & foreign landlords out of existence. It’s simple.
It’s a pipedream.