Comment on Why limit immigration?
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 3 months ago
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.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
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
Thorry84@feddit.nl 3 months ago
Yeah this is the biggest issue.
The way most housing gets built where I live it works like this: A company handles the project management, buying the land, getting the permits, hiring the builders, doing the marketing/sales etc. This costs a HUGE amount of money, which they don’t have. So these projects get designed on paper and then sold to investors. These put in a big amount of money, with the expectation of the project making money in the sales of the housing in the end. This means they can often double their entry in a couple of years, which is really good in terms of investments. As the investors want to make as much money as possible, the company designing the housing have incentives to not only make the houses as dense as possible, but also as expensive as possible. Their margins in percent are about the same no matter the house, so a more expensive house makes them more money. This leads to really big expensive homes crammed together in either high rises or plots. It’s really dumb as well since detached homes are worth more, they build homes with like 2 meter between them. The biggest issue is, only rich people can afford these homes. Even though more homes are built, the majority of people looking to buy a home can’t afford these. Homes also get sold to investors again, to rent out as the house itself appreciates in value. These expensive homes also have the effect of driving up property prices in the area, which leads to more expensive houses and higher taxes.
In the end, it’s only the rich that profit. They get the good investment projects, making them even more rich. They get to buy the expensive new homes to live in. They get to buy the homes to rent out and use as an investment vehicle.
Some places have made them build cheaper homes as well, if they want to get the permit. But it’s not enough. We need to be building practical affordable homes, but we don’t cause the people putting up the money to build stuff don’t want to.
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
If only we had some sort of public entity that could fund housing investments with little to no financial gain, but great gains to public support and well-being that was also in charge of controlling and permitting immigration rates so that the two could be balanced…
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Yeah, immigrants would be better served by apartments
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
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.
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 3 months ago
AFAIK, the issue around me is largely profitability. You can buy up acres if land, chop it up into 1/2ac parcels, quickly build cheap “luxury houses”, and sell them for 2-3x your costs, easily earning $200k+ per house sold (“Coming soon, from the low $400s…!”). And it’s all with fairly minimal regulation, compared to building high-density housing in existing cities. Compare and contrast that with building low- and middle-income high-density housing, where you’re going to end up managing it as apartments (probably not condos; that’s uncommon in my area); that means that you’re in the red for a larger number of years before you pay back the initial costs of construction, since the profitability comes through rents.
Maybe I’m wrong; all I can comment on is the kind of building that I’m seeing in my area, and the way that the closest city–which was originally about 90 minutes away–is now alarmingly close.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Sprawl sucks. Density is what we should be promoting.
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Of course, and I agree (…even as I’m looking at buying a few hundred acres of land in a desert three hours away from any town over 1000 people…). But you’ve got a lot of incentives working against that.
The town I’m in is starting to be a suburb of the city 90 minutes away; the town wants these people, and their homes from the low $400s, because that’s more tax base; they pay property taxes that the town wouldn’t otherwise have. So my town is happy–kind of–to be part of the problem.