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Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

> Housing shortage in just a land shortage in urban areas.

You're talking about supply when you mention housing shortages, but let's look at the other part of the equation in a shortage: demand. Another perspective for a housing shortage might be to call it a people surplus. I don't blame anybody for seeking a better life, but I'd think at some point, an excess amount of illegal migration would have a noticeable impact in some areas.

> housing sits idle

Just curious on if there's a good estimate of how many houses sit idle and unused and if this has increased or decreased over time? I'm sure that some housing sits unused, but if it's a few thousand homes in an area where there's say a few hundred thousand families looking to buy, I'm not sure if that really makes a huge dent.

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There are over 16 million vacant homes in the US[0]. There is also only over 500k homeless people in the US[1] meaning we could house each homeless person around 32 times over. I think it could make quite a large dent

[0]https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/report-how-many-homes-...

[1]https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/homelessness-sta...

> There are over 16 million vacant homes in the US[0].

This sounds like a very large number, but large compared to what? The key thing to look at is how does it compare to the past? If there's no substantial difference today in this rate versus the past, then maybe idle homes might not be the biggest factor. I don't know the answer to this or where to lookup this stat.

> There is also only over 500k homeless people in the US[1] meaning we could house each homeless person around 32 times over. I think it could make quite a large dent

Homelessness is sort of a separate and off-topic issue largely involving mental health and drug abuse and cannot be viewed as being solvable simply by using idle homes. You could give each homeless person a mansion, and many of them would be ruined beyond repair in a short amount of time due to all kinds of unfathomable reasons like very ill people using a hammer to search for demons hiding in the walls.

There is undoubtedly significant percentage of homeless people that would greatly benefit by being put in a home. Stating otherwise is delusional and morally reprehensible.

> There is undoubtedly significant percentage of homeless people that would greatly benefit by being put in a home.

Of course many people would benefit from a plan to solve homelessness by being gifted a free house: among them the homeless person themselves, probably the already well-off or rich corporations like BlackRock selling it to the government for 250% market value, and the Federal employees overseeing such a fiefdom.

But simply counting empty houses and the number of homeless and observing that the number of empty houses is greater than the number of homeless isn't the framework for a solution. I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has worked with the homeless and experienced why they're homeless first-hand. The number of normal people who are simply down-on-their-luck through unfortunate life events is relatively small. Many people who have been homeless longer than a very short time are not even close to being well. Many of them would destroy their free home, and I do quite literally mean that they would take it apart looking for scrap to pawn for drugs, or to destroy demons they think are hiding in the walls.

Even beyond the homeless issue, have you considered all of the costs to such a plan? I don't even mean who is going to pay money for the homes and set this up, I'm talking about the actual outcome to society. Just adding one mentally ill guy in a normal neighborhood who isn't watched 24/7 by professional help is going to utterly terrorize his neighbors. Throwing hundreds of thousands of homeless into average neighborhoods in idle homes would ruin quality of life in this country. Would you prefer living next door to the guy who collects bags of poop, the guy who likes to expose himself to strangers for fun, or the guy who who's walking around all day looking for stuff to steal and who's willing to rough you up if you look at him the wrong way? Which one of these do you want around watching your kids play?

This doesn't provide any data on the livability of those homes. Homes that have sat vacant for years would needs tens of thousands of dollars to be habitable, or impossible to bring up to modern code

>There is also only over 500k homeless people in the US[1] meaning we could house each homeless person around 32 times over. I think it could make quite a large dent

As long as you're fine with shipping homeless people to desolate places like oklahoma, sure! There's a reason why people flock to cities even though the rent there is sky-high.

> I don't blame anybody for seeking a better life, but I'd think at some point, an excess amount of illegal migration would have a noticeable impact in some areas.

I don’t find this to be a useful line of thought most times because it’s extraordinarily nationalistic. What logic justifies saying that migrants are driving out current inhabitants? Only one where the current inhabitants are somehow superior. This doesn’t _just_ apply to international immigration, but also local. In HCOL places, people constantly don’t want people moving in from other cities. What justifies that? Somehow the locals in the city are superior to everyone else in the _entire world_?

Thankfully you cannot restrict moving across state borders. So what justifies restricting moving across national borders?

I really can’t think of a rational justification.

The reality is that the world had a shortage of nice places with high quality of living. Restricting immigration (or local migration) to reduce demand means that those people must stay in their lower quality of life area because of some artificial rule. That’s not fair. What makes a local any different from an immigrant? Both are people. If the immigrant wants to pay a lot of money to purchase a home from a local, why is that a bad thing?

The logic is that if your house can only comfortable accommodate 4 people then it makes sense to say no to the 100 people who also wants to move in. Resources are not infinite. The same goes with culture. The more people you add to a culture who doesn't care about or understand your culture, the more your culture will be destroyed.

I appreciate your response, and wanted to make a few quick points to your uncharacteristically (for HN) reasonable rebuttal. I just want to give a little nutshell version of my thoughts here because this is a very long and nuanced discussion that might not work best on HN.

> I don’t find this to be a useful line of thought most times because it’s extraordinarily nationalistic.

Ultimately as a philosophy, I'm not super in favor of the concept of nations either. However, so long as we exist in a world with governments, somebody is making your area's rules. If it's not your group, it's outsiders who vote with their feet and who are going to decide it for you, to their own economic and cultural advantage and not necessarily yours.

Completely unfettered mass migration would not be as objectionable if we were living in a more libertarian system: no welfare state, no subsidized transportation, no rules preventing the right of free association, etc. Then everybody is just their own person who poses no potential of financial burden on you with their presence and who you're not forced to associate with if you don't want to.

The problem is that you can't have both a massive welfare state and unfettered immigration without posing many significant problems for the native population.

> What logic justifies saying that migrants are driving out current inhabitants?

Please note that I didn't explicitly make the argument that migrants are driving out current inhabitants. I simply made an economics point about housing prices. All other things being equal, the demand for housing increasing would tend to increase the price, right?

>You're talking about supply when you mention housing shortages

Because supply has been depressed since the Great Recession: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

Meanwhile, population growth over the last two decades has been the lowest since the Great Depression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...

>I'd think at some point, an excess amount of illegal migration would have a noticeable impact in some areas.

The problem is that housing isn't where the jobs are. That this is reflected in labor prices should be evidence enough. The prevalence of right-to-work and union-busting means that workers want to live in a place with multiple job options, which means that there is demand for cities. Working for the only paper mill in Covington, Virginia isn't such an attractive proposition when you can be fired at will and have to move to a new town.

> Because supply has been depressed since the Great Recession: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

These are very interesting and useful stats, but I'm not sure how it follows that newly created units going up and down at various points in time proves that the supply has been depressed. Can you explain how the supply is being artificially reduced? In some areas like San Francisco I suppose, there's a hesitance by many to want to build denser high-rises and building is a challenge to push through, but I'm not sure what else you might be referring to here.

> Meanwhile, population growth over the last two decades has been the lowest since the Great Depression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...

The growth rate might be lower, but because there's a finite amount of land near cities, the problem might be that this is one area where absolute numbers matter more than rates because it's just physically tougher to build more units in a time period even if more laborers are available. (and this is even assuming that the census figures are anywhere close to accurate, which I'm not so sure about)

> there is demand for cities.

Of course many people want to live in cities for jobs and other perfectly valid reasons, but I'm not sure how this argues the point that illegal immigration doesn't have some sort of effect on the overall housing market. All other things being equal, a larger supply of people would have some sort of effect on the price, right?

> You're talking about supply when you mention housing shortages, but let's look at the other part of the equation in a shortage: demand. Another perspective for a housing shortage might be to call it a people surplus. I don't blame anybody for seeking a better life, but I'd think at some point, an excess amount of illegal migration would have a noticeable impact in some areas.

The demand in urban housing comes from rural areas going decrepit: schools close, no higher education at all, no fast and reliable Internet and 4G/5G mobile connectivity, no public transport, rotting roads and bridges, no banks, no medical services, no shopping, no employment, no entertainment other than drinking and shooting tin cans.

If you want to live a modern life, there is no alternative to moving to urban areas.

> schools close, no higher education at all, no fast and reliable Internet and 4G/5G mobile connectivity, no public transport, rotting roads and bridges, no banks, no medical services, no shopping, no employment, no entertainment other than drinking and shooting tin cans.

I live in a rural area.

Schools are open. Higher education not only exists, but the local community colleges partner with the state schools to give full access to us rural folk without having to commute in to the school. We have fiber to the home in many areas, high speed access in almost all the rest of the areas, and projects underway to fill in the gaps. We have 4G all over, 5G on a few towers. I can see 3 towers from my home, so we are not exactly disconnected. Our roads are doing fine - the local taxes pay for road maintenance quite well. Yes, we have banks. Farmers probably need more banking than you would expect. We are well covered there. We have medical service in every town and they partner with the state teaching university for specialist care, so we're doing OK there, too. Our unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in decades. Shopping exists here, too.

Rural areas are shrinking because people prefer cities. But we are not decrepit and you absolutely can live an enjoyable modern life here.

I don't want to pile on to all the other replies, but I think your mental model of rural life is several decades out of date

I live in a rural region and we do actually have fast internet and cell phones.

Not FTTH, but good coax.

Lots of banks too.

(Not supporting the other posters argument, just wondering where you get your information about rural areas)

> The demand in urban housing comes from rural areas going decrepit: schools close, no higher education at all, no fast and reliable Internet and 4G/5G mobile connectivity, no public transport, rotting roads and bridges, no banks, no medical services, no shopping, no employment, no entertainment other than drinking and shooting tin cans. If you want to live a modern life, there is no alternative to moving to urban areas.

I'm a city dweller, and I think this is an ugly, misinformed, elitist comment.

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