Sunday, October 20, 2024

FALSELY BLAMING THE UNDOCUMENTED WON’T SOLVE HOUSING PRICE CRISIS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

1720 OAK STREET, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA 90405
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“FALSELY BLAMING THE UNDOCUMENTED WON’T SOLVE HOUSING PRICE CRISIS”

 

No one who has looked at multiple listings of homes for sale anywhere in this country can doubt there’s a price crisis. That’s especially true in California, where the median price of homes sold in the last year topped $900,000.

 

This means almost half the homes sold here went for more than the mystical million-dollar figure. Five years ago, the median price was about $600,000. That is major league price inflation, which began while Donald Trump was president and continued steadily under Joe Biden.

 

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance says we should blame much of this on undocumented immigrants. They are, the Republican vice presidential candidate claimed in his debate with Democratic counterpart Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in this country.”

 

He was taken seriously when claiming with a straight face that illegals, most of whom arrive at the southern border penniless or nearly so, are competing heatedly with American citizens for homes that cost, at a minimum, well above $100,000. It was an absurd claim, but has gone largely unchallenged.

 

“You’ve got housing,” Vance added, “that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”

 

That’s a tad hard to believe if you’ve ever seen undocumented immigrants living eight to a room in low-priced motel rooms in virtually every part of California.

 

Similarly, Vance claims the handling of undocumented children at the border became sloppier after Trump's term, insisting that more than 320,000 illegal immigrant children are now unaccounted for. Many, he claimed, are used as “mules” to carry drugs for Latin-American cartels. He offered no evidence for any of this.

 

In fact, the government says the actual figure is more like 80,000 untracked children. The rise in unauthorized immigration of unaccompanied children began in 2014, with its growth continual ever since. During 2023, more than 113,000 such children were released to sponsors (statistics from the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute include all counties receiving at least 50 children per year), while in the first quarter of this year, the number was about 61,000, suggesting a doubling of undocumented children going to American sponsors in just one year.

 

By comparison, when Trump held office during 2019, more than 320,000 cases involving unaccompanied undocumented children were referred for resolution hearings. That number oddly coincides with the quantity of kids whose whereabouts Vance claimed are now unknown.

 

The figures are clearly rising, even though this phenomenon has received little publicity, and Vance gave no indication where his number originated. Regardless, unaccompanied immigrant children are not bidding on many homes.

 

The Vance claims were part of a politically motivated drive to make illegal immigration an even more potent issue than it long has been. Linking illegal immigrants to increased housing prices was an attempt to combine two serious issues.

 

But it totally contradicts past Republican claims that any significant presence of the undocumented in a neighborhood will drive housing prices down. Vance did not explain how the same people can simultaneously drive real estate costs both up and down. This is about as plausible as arguing that dirt-poor illegal immigrants can somehow compete to buy homes at current prices.

 

Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, told a reporter that “Immigrants do add to overall housing demand, (but) they cannot be blamed for the…surge in home prices and rents that took off in 2020 and 2021, when (overall) immigration reached its lowest levels in decades due to the pandemic.”

 

Plus, because they lack funds to buy at today’s prices, the undocumented are almost exclusively renters, not buyers.

 

“They are not the people who are buying homes,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for the Redfin online real estate service, confirmed to a reporter. He noted that to get a home loan, buyers need documentation, precisely what illegals lack…”They are more likely to seek out family members who already have a home, and double up.”

 

So this was a phony combination of issues from the moment Vance asserted it. One very real question is why almost no one called him out for it.

 

 

    -30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

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