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Comment by arandomusername | Hacker News Reader

Do you refute that importing mass amount of people into a city, without substantially increasing supply of housing, increases the price of housing?

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Where I'm from the shortage of supply is also due in varying proportions to: too many airbnbs and secondary residence, rural flight, families being split in multiple households, increase of average home size, etc. Immigration certainly plays a part, but likely not as much as you think.

Biggest cause is insufficient increase in supply, often due to government regulations.

Immigration can heavily increase demand, and so it can play a big part, depending on the immigration numbers. Anyone moving in needs a place to live as well.

That issue goes far beyond immigration. You want a job, especially one that has growth potential? You move to a city, regardless of if you are a native or not. You can see all the same trends in cities and countries without a lot of immigration.

Depends on a host of factors.

Housing is also one of the few issues that is so local and immigration is such a tiny story around it to begin with. Prices are high in plenty of areas seeing little immigration activity

If the immigration is double the normal expected growth (~tripling the growth) it is not really tiny. It may very well be solvable, maybe even easily. But the problem in many European countries is that "the left" does not even acknowledge that this may be a problem and should be solved leading to many people voting for "the far right" that does acknowledge that this is a problem. In the US housing may not be the biggest issue, but the result is the same: the average voter can choose between "there is no problem, we can take in as many immigrant as we want forever" and "we don't want immigration".

This argument just doesn't make sense. The US annual population growth is currently 0.5%. Between 1960 and 2000 it rarely went below 1%, but since 2010 it's always been well under.

Many of the most expensive cities in the US have relatively low immigration compared to other areas with much more reasonable real estate, and it behooves you to link it where housing is expensive and immigration is very high. You have to actually provide some sources before you throw out blanket comments blaming immigrants for our problems

NYC, one of the most expensive cities, has 37% foreign born population.

You’re entirely against people coming here? You’re not focused on undocumented migrants?

You’re also failing to draw a causal link here. Not to mention NYC is one of the biggest cities in the world period (10th). It’s hardly representative of most US cities.

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