Dallas Fed: 30% of housing cost increase driven by unauthorized immigration [pdf]

skiing_crawling

unauthorized? Are they trying to find a middle ground word between "illegal" and "undocumented"?

MrMorden

Undocumented immigrants "raised local house prices and rents without expanding housing supply" — obviously, since local governments of both parties hate anyone who doesn't already own and make it illegal to build more housing. Not an immigration problem, although obviously the Trump administration is trying to make it more expensive to build by deporting anyone brown regardless of whether or not they're lawfully present (or even a citizen), tariffs, and pretty much the entire scope of Project 2025.

rawgabbit

Legal immigration also raise housing costs. And if we complain, we are labeled as racist.

bediger4000

You know, if they'd said 5%, I would buy it. 30% is a lie on the face of it. No one single factor dies that much.

amanaplanacanal

In a properly functioning market, new supply would be built when there is new demand. Perhaps they should try to figure out why that isn't happening.

kjkjadksj

Immigrants aren’t the ones restricting zoned capacity. That would be local government.

timoth3y

The research is impressive in its granularity. However, they seem to simply assert causality. It would seem far more likely that people (illegal or not) move to areas experiencing economic booms that, among other things, is push up home prices.

pembrook

Yes, a demand increase without supply increase causes prices to rise. In other news, water is wet. The fact that people are arguing over this is astonishing to me. Politics morphing into the religion of modernity is the worst thing that has happened this century thus far.

hedgehog

I'm not sure why the editorializing in the title but here's the actual abstract: > From early 2021 to early 2024, the U.S. experienced an unprecedented boom in unauthorized immigration, followed by a rapid slowdown beginning in mid-2024. We provide the first systematic empirical assessment of the labor- and housing-market effects of this episode. Using newly available administrative microdata on individual immigrants, we construct measures of net unauthorized immigration at the national and local levels and exploit plausibly exogenous variation across local markets. We find that unauthorized immigrant worker flows (UIWF) increased local employment approximately one-for-one, without significant declines in local wages. These inflows also raised local house prices and rents without expanding housing supply, consistent with a housing demand shock in the face of short-run inelastic supply. Lastly, we find that UIWF reduced labor income per capita, consistent with downward wage composition of the local workforce, and strongly reduced government transfers. These findings should help inform policy debates surrounding how unauthorized immigrant labor supply impacts local labor and housing markets as well as public finances. Basically what the paper says is at a city-by-city level unauthorized immigrants increase housing prices in to a similar degree to authorized immigrants (about 1% pop increase -> 2% housing price increase), are roughly 100% employed (increase local employment 1:1), and use government services at a lower rate than the base population (about 1% pop increase -> overall 5% decrease in spending). Then a lot of discussion about methodology and related work. I'm a little skeptical of some of the assumptions, they (and apparently the citations) don't appear to account for the fact that in all cases people are more likely to move to places with jobs (economic activity driving labor demand), housing supply is generally pretty inelastic on the scale of a couple years, and so even if nobody moved to the city it's possible wages (and housing prices) would go up anyway.

cyanydeez

Cool, lets go after the businesses that hired them because they're the ones who can provide the equivelent remuneration and profitted off that. Cause you know, that's typically how things work when you're actually concerned about economic impacts and arn't just a rcist dog whistling dog & pony circus show looking to deflect from the other bad to disasterous economic decisions. Think about it: if this is true, American citizens have been harmed by Businesses that illegally hired workers and cause $X amount of damage. Instead of going after $X + damages of $Y, we've commited to spend $Z amount to go after those workers, even when all evidence points to the illegal hiring both brings in a profit and displaces american workers. It's such a pointless series of racist shrugs and waste of tax payer funds. Instead of going after the profits of businesses, we go into debt trying to attack workers.

jleyank

If ya build more housing, the value of existing homes might go down. Unfortunately, nobody wants to see their home decrease in value so they don’t want new construction. Or they want it “over there a ways” such that it’s not a negative. Commuting gets worse as there’s no satellite jobs or work from home. And nobody it seems wants to see higher density housing unless there’s really no choice. So people end up in large housing which is mostly empty after the kid(s) leave. And their retirement depends on selling out for a profit.