Is there such a thing as “affordable housing?”
I’ve written before about how the 1965 law that launched chain migration, which allows legal immigrants to invite whole family clans to the U.S., has increased demand for housing. Metropolitan areas are especially stressed with no vacant land left to build on. Liberal governments try to game the system by attacking single-family homes and local zoning. Socialist candidates even want to freeze rents in buildings already losing money. The concept of supply & demand is meaningless to these armchair Marxists.
When our ancestors came over, it was usually a working male who established a foothold here. The Census record for my father in 1930 had him living in a 2-room Brooklyn apartment with five of his male cousins, barely 20-somethings. In those days, each could invite a wife and children to come to America, if they had any, but no other family members. I believe that all the cousins ended up marrying Italian American girls, including my mother. The “family reunification act” of 1965 lifted all restrictions. Starting then, the fecund nations of the Third World poured in, inviting a chain of elderly parents and distant cousins to come with Green Cards to compete for housing in crowded cities. One immigrant can summon scores of relatives to dwell here. These families are used to multi-generational habitation and can, and do, pool their finances to outbid locals for homes. (I won’t address the problem of illegal immigrants who also need places to live.)
Where can the locals go? In the 1950s, our families lived in crowded urban areas when farms and vacant lands surrounded major cities. They had places to move to, even though it meant 3-hour commutes to jobs. Today, our kids and grandkids need an inheritance or Mom & Dad to bankroll them for a house. Moving South is a popular option. Demand “affordable housing” all you want, lucky if you can even find a trailer or mobile home park in the North. Those are the only affordable homes that I can think of.
But our politicians happily string us along in total denial of the chain migration factor. Pollyannas constantly remind us how America “welcomed” Italians, Irish, and Jews to these shores; and how the real housing problem is White enclaves unwilling to double-up on land use and accessory apartments.
The Wall Street Journal had a story of a Black/Jewish landlady in the Bronx who owns a 35-unit apartment house covered under NYC’s rent stabilization laws. She is deathly afraid of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat-Socialist who promises to freeze rents. (Former Mayor DeBlasio—née Wilhelm—froze rents in stabilized apartments back in 2015, 2016, and 2020, without freezing real estate taxes.) Many of her tenants are on Section 8 subsidies and already hard-pressed to pay their portion of the rent. Her aging building requires constant repairs, stoves and refrigerators replaced, and trying to evict deadbeat tenants is costly and difficult. This is what affordable housing is: a money pit.
During President Trump’s first term, some senators drafted a bill to scrap chain migration, limiting relatives and adding a point system to qualify for Green Cards. The bill is still buried in committee, opponents fearful that the country will collapse without unfettered legal immigration.
Affordable housing has no solution without land to build on. Even then, the infrastructure requirements would mean skyrocketing taxes. The most practical solution is to reduce demand for homes and apartments. Chain migration should not be untouchable. It’s the one component that government can control. -JLM
Recent Comments