What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food.
For instance, 70 years ago, more American cars were built in America. The money that consumers paid for cars went to American companies. This caused increased demand for (American) workers, which increased workers’ wages, and thus their spending power, and thus increased the price of goods. Their pay increased sufficiently to allow them to maintain, and in fact improve, their quality of life, because the inflation was driven by wage growth.
Compare to a globalized world. The money Americans spend on cars today mostly ends up in foreign nations. The demand for the produce of foreign companies pushes up wages in foreign countries, and causes inflation there. Americans get items for cheaper than they could be produced in their own nation, due to labor cost differences. The rub is that they’re not fueling their own economies, which leaves workers unable to afford items which cannot be produced elsewhere.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mercantilism.asp#:~:tex....
It strikes me that most people would feel like spending money on your own family/tribe/community may be reasonable despite what mercantilism says as an economic concept.
Not invalid as much as leaves everyone in the measured system materially worse off. Mercantilism is simply a failed way to raise your own living standards. (It might be a good way to concentrate wealth within your system. But only within, not from without.)
If I hire my son to do my yard work instead of my neighbor, how does that make my son objectively worse off?
Within system/family, obviously this has increased wealth compared to hiring my neighbor.
Without system, it has only made me worse off to the proportion that I have "overpaid" my son. But because it's zero-sum, my son has benefited to the exact proportion that I've been made worse off.
Edit: Back to the context of globalization, "overpaying" my neighbor to build my car only makes me worse off to the same proportion s/he has been helped. When you factor in the concept of preference for psychological distance, that might be a worthy tradeoff. I.e., there's a psychological basis for valuing the financial well-being of my son/neighbor over the abstract person in another country* and this action seems logically consistent with that psychological framework.
* This isn't to say the decision is morally justified. That's a different argument than the economic one.
We agree. Consider the world to be your street and your country your neighbor and your houses. Paying your neighbor more to keep the money local doesn't work to make your "country" richer. It just helps concentrate wealth with your neighbor. Mercantilist protectionism is about redistributing, not increasing, domestic resources.
Consider a more dire twist: you have money to pay for a life-saving operation for either your own child or another child on the other side of the world. Are you saying there is should be no personal preference in this scenario?
I'm saying there are perfectly reasonable expectations to concentrate that wealth due to human psychology once you move away from the academic and abstract.
Yes. That's why I said the difference isn't invalid. It's just more like a hidden redistributive tax.
In small doses, this is fine and a way democracies repay their patrons. In larger doses, it leaves everyone poor. Too poor to afford a life-saving operation for anyone around.
Regarding "it leaves everyone poor", how is the case if it's zero sum? It seems like it comes down to how you define your metric of 'poor'. It seems like it presupposes there isn't enough money to go around, so it's better to have a few people rich and the rest destitute, rather than have everyone just be marginally poor.
Or are we getting into productivity incentive territory here?
Trade isn’t zero sum. Ricardian mechanics is what overturned mercantilism. You paying more for your neighbour to do work than someone down the street deprives you of money and everyone of economies of scale.
And those other dimensions come at a cost. National security seems like a reasonable thing to pay a cost for. Enriching an oligarch does not. A lot of protectionism is about the latter.
It makes people materially poorer and redistributes wealth, typically up. That is a fair price to pay in some circumstances, e.g. bolstering defence manufacturers.
Yes. It says exactly that.
Now, there are details that can change things either way. But the one thing about economics, that is known for about 3 centuries, is that usually arbitrary boundaries to commerce make people poorer. Usually, both on average and on the poor extreme. There is more variability of impact for rich people.
Just avoid anything advanced enough to have a small focus.
Something that works for the general case should work for both extremes, because then that better informs usage for the general case (this applies to development too, imo).
If we know how to manage the economy when: no money is flowing out to foreign countries + all the money is flowing out to foreign countries, then we have a good idea of the best way to handle _some_ money flowing out to foreign countries.
Rich people can virtue-signal all day long about how they live without a phone, but if you're poor and a potential employer or benefits office asks you for a phone number to process your application you can't afford to risk losing or delaying the opportunity.
I understand that it makes sense in a lot of cases.
It's great that everyone can have a TV for 1/100 of what it cost in 1950 or whatever, but it does not solve the very obvious issues. People have problems paying rent, they have problems paying groceries. They see that they have to work more and more just to make the next month. And no cheap TV will help them do that, no matter how many "oh, but all is so much better now" articles are written.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/92689-over-the-past-100-yea...
1. Telecoms, and increasingly smartphones, are not a luxury but a necessity for functioning in most of today's societies.
2. That a smartphone of and by itself is not sufficient for a thriving existence, with reference to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: food, shelter,
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vwfb6/maslows...>
There's also Maslow's Swimming Pool, which surfaced in the context of the Greek austerity crisis of the 2010s:
Succinctly: "Yes, we've got a swimming pool. But that won't feed my children."
<https://www.dw.com/en/the-human-toll-of-greek-austerity/audi...>
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3ey7d1/maslows...>
Another variant is to note people showing up to relief services (e.g., food bank, natural disaster aid stations) in SUVs or luxury cars. The fact that someone with evidence of past prosperity is now seeking aid doesn't mean that they're undeserving of same, or should be scorned. It's that misfortune is reaching far beyond its usual populations (the multi-generational poor, disabled, addicted, disempowered groups, etc.).
Julian Bond also calls out self-actualisation snake oil:
There's a special part of hell reserved for the snake oil selling charlatans who push some woo called Reversed Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's much loved by people who talk about "The Secret", life style coaches and executive training. "Be a nice self-actualised person, you'll be full of esteem which will allow you to love others who won't threaten your safety and so the universe will fulfill your bodies needs."
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190115030839/https://plus.goog...>
Yet another realisation (also through a G+ discussion) is that Maslow's Hierarchy is best considered not merely as a set of essential and nourishing goods and services, but as being those elements paired with security in those elements. The hand that offers whilst threatening, withdrawing, or threatening is not nurturing but the definition of abuse and trauma.
Living on a knife's edge, at all times, is not tenable.
So, rather than the pyramid of physiological needs, safety, belonging and love, esteem, and self-actualisation, I see:
- Physiological needs + security in those needs.
- Social needs + security in those.
- Esteem (recognition for accomplishments) + security in that status.
- Self-actualisation + security in those achievements.
Maslow splits out security as its own level, but that jars with my own experience of noting times where one or more (and in the worst instances: all) such needs were fulfilled either in a highly contingent manner ("I'll give you X if you do Y", or "If you do Y I'll withhold X"). That's the extreme of manipulation and precarity.
Finally, Yonatan Zunger's essay on "financial shock wealth" is an excellent reframing of the wealth/poverty discussion (from 2017):
<https://scribe.rip/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6d...>
1. Why is that surprising? That has been a natural state of human societies from the beginning of civilization. What would be really surprising is if things changed.
2. Roughly two thirds of Americans own a home. That stands in contradiction with your claim that most Americans cannot afford to own a home.
* I think this also needs to be put in the context of houses are also bigger than they used to be, but there is also a higher percentage of two-income households.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/american-debt-...
I wonder what percentage of that was mortgage taken on an already paid off (or partly paid off) home in order to be able to buy consumer trinkets.
Ugh. I guess that's exactly how governments fund themselves.
I don't see how a responsible person can even compete in that environment. It's like joining a sport where everyone's doping.
I was about to mention Fannie and Freddie as a footnote about how the government might be involved in all this, but didn't think it was a big deal. Yet Google tells me they end up buying 70% of mortgages. So there's some flow here that I'd do well to understand.
Lower cost than that, there are C-grade prismatic cells. Usb/12V adapters exist for a single cell as well, although i'm not sure if they are in that form factor.
My personal opinion is that this hasn't changed much because human psychology hasn't changed much. We are a status-driven species and, lacking other measures, we revert to the easily quantifiable: wealth, house size, education credentialism, etc. to derive our place.
As for out of touch, I grew up eating government peanut butter and free school lunches. Lots of years that is all I ate. Food assistance is great and we should do more, but jeff bezos hording wealth isn't causing people to starve as gp suggests, food is incredibly cheap. The idea people are starving is rediculous.
You realize that there are people who are homeless and who live in areas that don't have any support systems for homelessness (e.g. homeless shelters), right?
You have proposed that a homeless person obtain a phone, find a library that'll mail books, obtain a mailbox, have a book mailed to them, presumably pay for return postage, all so they can obtain recipes to cook on a stove they don't have with utensils they likely lack with ingredients they can't afford.
Homeless people aren't in that situation because they needed someone to write down "how to make rice in a pot", nor are they likely to have discretionary income for your proposals.
And I feel like you do not understand that the average American is not homeless.
If you are homeless you are not going to be a person who is spending >$40/mo for food and needing a cook book to make cheap food interesting to eat. You will just buy cheap food until you bootstrap yourself back to a house and a stable job.
People who spend >$40 per month on food who live 40 miles away from the nearest library.
But of course, there will always be people falling through any cracks. That does not mean that the original piece of advice isn't sound, though.
Moreover—can you put beans, rice, eggs, and mixed veggies in a sandwich? Because a sandwich was one of OP’s “$40/mo” suggestions. A food budget where a simple ham and cheese sandwich is an unimaginable luxury is ridiculous to propose as a reasonable target.
Not to mention the spoilage that goes on. The rice and beans can keep long-term, but you'll need to do logistics on chicken, tortillas etc to keep fresh ones in the pipeline without wasting any, which you can't afford either.
Look, I've had food boxes before. The food box is an amazing wondrous bit of charity where you can get a ton of free food just for asking. There's cereal, I've gotten big hunks of frozen meat, dry beans and rice, I've gotten bits of candy and such, lots of staples, powdered milk, canned chickpeas and spinach and you-name-it.
However the food boxes only go so far. They won't cook the meals for you. They won't give you the utensils, pots and pans. You don't get any fats, oils, herbs, spices, or seasonings. they won't tell you which ingredients combine in a flavorful way. You don't get any recipes that use these ingredients and don't call for something you don't have.
Now you boil some water, throw in some beans and rice plain, and cook until soft. Go ahead, throw in some string beans for vitamins, and some kind of protein. Spoil yourself! Then try to choke that down in the absence of salt, butter, or anything that might impart flavor. How long until you're going to just kill yourself?
Our knowledge of what is healthy is spotty at best, but plenty of countries that eat a lot of ham and cheese (France, Spain, Italy) are fairly OK health-wise, so it certainly seems to indicate that there is nothing seriously wrong about either.
Here's who can't practically afford that: Someone with 3 kids working 80 hours a week in service or truck driving. Or someone that is disabled. Or someone that has severe mental health issues.
There are quite a few prerequisites that you assume exist that just don't in a poor American household and the primary one that doesn't exist is time.
Beyond the time you need to plan, shop, cook, clean, you need:
-Motivation to do so
-Pots and pans
-Knowledge of cooking and nutrition
-A grocery store nearby (39.5 million Americans live in food deserts)
-A way to get there (Many can't afford cars or can't drive)
-Working water and electricity
TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans have none of the above
And whereas in other countries you may live in a multi-generation home or otherwise be able to do subsistence farming, that's not really possible without land of some sort which almost no poor people in America have.
Your list of reasons is really just betraying how little you think poor people are like yourself. You are portraying them as helpless animals.
Also, lack of motivation as a reason they can't boil an egg, so they just go hungry instead? Do you even care about reality or just scoring internet points?
Unless you're working a blue collar job in America you don't see this
You are actually claiming that there are tens of millions of adult humans, who have lived 20, 30 years, and are literally incapable of procuring one pot. You are saying they can't independently manage to acquire the cooking skills to boil rice. It's just absurd.
Meanwhile those same people are statistically obese. Somehow despite living without electricity, money, pots, illiterate and 50 miles from the nearest grocery store they eat enough to be obese (can you explain how they get enough food to eat too much despite it being impossible for them to acquire groceries at all?) and yet it is unreasonable to think they might boil an egg.
It's not a case of not understanding, or not having the skills, or it being “unreasonable to think they might” do anything.
https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine...
https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the...
I get not understanding, but can you try not to be so obnoxious about it, please? It's clear you don't have these problems. If they seem to you to be absurd struggles to have, read some Albert Camus.
I accept there are sick people. But not all people are sick. Most poor people do in fact make themselves inexpensive food at home. That you and others want to claim it is impossible for them to do so is bizarre.
Also please go answer the question over in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232600 of what ingredients go in the sandwich.
You haven't heard of depressed people? A lot of homeless people are depressed, which is why they don't work.
Normal people who are used to cooking at home see it as no big deal to whip up a simple meal.
Some of the rest of us encounter insurmountable obstacles in our own kitchens.
Personally, I haven't prepared a single meal at home since last October. I've been ordering delivery at an extraordinary markup.
Several bad experiences last year put me permanently off home meal preparation. I've tried all the alternatives. I'm desperate to save money; I'm desparate to eat better. I have been left with no other choice.
Basically 100% of my paychecks go to fund those meals because the alternatives are absolutely intractable, due to several of the above factors.
Most people can't imagine being unable to use the microwave or boil water.
It's difficult to explain succinctly what the barriers are, and without getting in a big debate about my abilities and limits. But in a nutshell:
Start with intractable problems with pest control. If I eat delivery, I get no bugs. If I prepare fresh meals, the cockroaches, gnats and other pests immediately descend. I can't avoid standing water/dirty dishes, and so the longer I try my hand in the kitchen, the worse the bugs get. I'm a renting tenant and 100% reliant on the landlord to do the pest control, and it's ineffective. If I want a deep treatment, I have to shut down my entire kitchen, tear it apart, and put it back together afterwards. So I am roundly cursed for even trying this.
Fitness - I'm not a young man anymore and as a beginner, my time in the kitchen is very inefficient. I could spend 2-3 hours at a time for one meal in a day. I couldn't sleep or rest enough to make it up, and living with this deficit took its toll, especially if stopping to rest meant I wouldn't eat or empty the dishes from the sink, and we're back to cockroaches.
Comptenence - since I never learned how to really cook or put recipes together, I find it amazingly hard to plan out meals and produce stuff that is appealing or even normal. I found it very difficult to collect recipes and work from them, especially when trying to manage fridge/pantry inventory, and oftentimes I wound up with something edible but really weird-tasting because I put together the wrong flavors. Or, my hunger would militate against knowing what I am doing and make it incredibly frustrating to remember all the steps in cooking.
Cooking meals from scratch requires planning and organization, which I found it hard to adapt into a kitchen context, and it was crazy-making if I was hungry for breakfast now and there was nothing but dirty dishes in the sink and I didn't know where to start.
I went to the hospital multiple times last year, because I was extraordinarily exhausted and I truly felt that my heart could fail any moment if I kept that all up. It was truly traumatic. If I could merely find a middle way to preparing simple meals once in a while, just to keep delivery costs down, I would do that, but for now, I'll follow the path of least fear and trembling.
Then you can start with pasta which takes slightly longer to boil and you can get a pre-made jar of pasta sauce to put on it. You can even put cold pasta sauce on a hot pasta and it will warm up.
Neither of these dishes will harm you if you mess up cooking them, and both take less than 30 minutes. Practice makes perfect, so you can iterate and try new things.
I've had pretty intense past problems in the past, I found the best ways to address them are keeping all food and sealed containers, preferably glass jars with a ceiling lid. Doing dishes and avoiding standing water also helps. The idea is the star of the bugs. If there is no food they won't come looking.
As a side note not intended to be aggressive or attacking, if the idea of boiling pasta or Ramen induces fear or anxiety, you should seek medical help. Not everyone is typical, but everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow.
The entire problem is solved, everyone, crisis over.
The argument seems to revolve around the fact that there will always be people who are way worse off than most others. It’s not particularly more surprising than the fact that there will also always be people who are way better off than most others.
> Deaths attributed to malnutrition more than doubled, from about 650 in 2018 to roughly 1,400 in 2022, according to preliminary death certificate data from the California Department of Public Health. The same trend occurred nationwide, with malnutrition deaths more than doubling, from about 9,300 deaths in 2018 to roughly 20,500 in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
> Malnutrition is particularly common among older people, especially those who are ill, low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food or medical services. It can result from not eating enough but also from poor eating habits that lead to nutritional deficiencies. The majority of deaths in California from malnutrition last year occurred in residents 85 and older.
Also in the same period there were around 300,000 deaths due to obesity with around 30,000 in california.
The claim was that no one dies of involuntary malnutrition. The claim is false.
It's completely obvious that OP meant that otherwise healthy people aren't starving to death. That used to be common, millions of otherwise healthy people died in famines in Ireland and Ukraine and China not so long ago. People that were healthy couldn't find a way to get their hands on enough calories and they wasted away and died, and their children wasted away and died, gradually over months. That literally doesn't happen in the US and hasn't for a long long time, and if you are claiming it does you live in a land of make believe.
That sure sounds like the "low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food" bit from my quote.
> It's completely obvious that OP meant that otherwise healthy people aren't starving to death.
The chances of zero people having done that in a country of 330 million people "in decades", as asserted, is quite slim.
https://www.mtshastanews.com/story/news/2021/02/05/living-an... is a case of a physically healthy man starving to death in SF.
https://www.newsweek.com/2023/01/20/starved-death-american-j... is a case of someone starving to death in jail for want of $100 bail.
I rather suspect other examples can be found.
Like the parent said, you seem to be disputing my original claim out of spite and in bad faith.
1400-1800 calories for an average height adult male is a reasonable floor (and that's a non-obesity scale). The $1.30 per day budget might get you around 1/3 of that calorie requirement, without solely existing on something like rice.
You can get by on closer to ~$90-$120 per month, per adult, and actually bring in enough calories to not starve over time. That's a surviving floor. You can temporarily go a bit lower to scrape by ($50-$90), however that's not livable longer term, you'll suffer increasingly.
If you modestly augment with various free food assistance options (not talking about SNAP), you could stretch the lower ~$50-$90 category up to something more like the $120 category consistently.
Even when I was buying a home back in 2011 there were basically no good plots of land for sale. What was there was about $10,000 an acre. I eventually got my house for $180,000 and it’s on 15 acres, meaning my 3,000 square foot house was basically only $30,000 when you account for the land price.
Obviously building vertically helps in cities, but that comes with its own costs as well.
It’s supply and demand and supply is limited by the surface area of the earth. In the short term countries could absolutely help themselves by limiting immigration. Population growth has outpaced new housing for the last 20 years in the US: https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced...
There were 2.7 million illegal border crossings in FY 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna53517
1.6 million housing units were built in 2021: https://www.builderonline.com/data-analysis/housing-activity....
Canada built 321,000 units of housing in 2021 but is in pace to have over 500,000 immigrants this year.
It’s unsustainable and people think you’re a racist for bringing it up so it never gets talked about.
I couldn't take you seriously, anyway. 2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units, but you're trying to imply that each of those illegal border crossings took a housing unit or something like that. Perhaps people on Facebook are that dumb.
Only if you assume all 2.7 million people are now homeless.
Price is a function of supply and demand. Obviously, increasing the number of people within a system without commensurately increasing housing will result in upward pressure on housing prices.
You could argue that the system-wide effect is minimal, but you would need data to do that, which you haven't provided.
That was the explicit intent of prop 13. Triggering the NIMBYtastrophe and privatizing commensurate increases in rents and land values was an entirely deliberate and cynical wealth grab that drove millions into poverty in California.
I get that we're supposed to be more angry at immigrants than Howard Jarvis and his friends though.
Just as we're supposed to be upset at "AI taking jobs" rather than deliberate trade policy.
Scapegoats have gotta goat.
Those are 2.7 million STOPS. It's not an estimate. The means the number of people actually crossing is higher. Those stopped are generally given a court date and released into the country. Someone transporting drugs wouldn't be.
What they are saying is a particular group should not be scapegoated, particularly when that group is taken advantage of to subsidize the quality of life of those that are demonizing them.
It comes down to having a nuanced understanding of the issue and rejecting overly simplistic (and wrong) mental models.
Why isn't the same argument being made about food? More people equals more demand, right? Shouldn't there be a commensurate increase in food costs? But people are able to mentally understand that immigrants are disproportionately providing the food supply. Not only are they more willing to do that work than native born Americans, they are also more productive in terms of both output and cost. If we were to employ only native born Americans in agriculture and meat-packing, costs are likely to go up, not down.
The same relationship holds for construction, especially in the south. Over 60% of housing costs are construction. Labor is a big part of that. Immigrants provide a disproportionate amount of that labor and they generally do so at lower cost. So by reducing immigration, you are going to increase the largest input to building homes in the hopes that you can bring down overall costs through reduction in demand.
Where that all balances in overall costs, I'm not sure. But I do know that overly simplistic models like "less immigration = lower housing costs" tend to miss those competing dynamics.
Of course costs will go up. So will pay. You're right in that in the case of food it's hard to say how that would all equalize. However, are we to rely on what's essentially an underclass forever? That seems pretty dystopian, and unsustainable.
Home prices I'd argue wouldn't be affected as much. The "dumb" labor in building houses is pretty cheap. Framing, roofing, etc. isn't much of the labor cost and they aren't on the jobsite for that long. Skilled work such as plumbers, electricians, and the like cost much more. There are kind of inbetween jobs such as drywall taping and tiling and I don't know how much of that is done with immigrant labor. In my experience it's basically none but I could be off on that.
Regardless about how much we export, prices are tightly coupled to supply and demand. If your theory holds, we should see a commensurate increase in cost. It doesn't matter if net exports go down unless there are effects from steep tariffs.
I agree that a large part of that many Americans are unwilling to do that work for that pay. And yet they are beneficiaries of that low-pay work in the form of low food costs. I find it particularly unsettling when those who directly benefit simultaneously demonize the immigrants who they derive some of that benefit. However, there have been studies showing that Americans underproduce migrant labor in industries like agriculture. So it's not just the pay, it the ability to produce. Similar work quotes farmers as saying they literally can't hire Americans to do the work. Unless I suppose you want to pay them salaries that risk farms being unsustainable financially. The extension of these points is if you were to hire Americans at an American wage, you get both less production and a higher cost while simultaneously risking the solvency of the farms.
I also agree that the use of an immigrant underclass is dystopian. Especially when you factor in the abuse that occurs in workplaces where employees are fearful of recourse due to their immigration status. And yet it happens and one of the often used excuses is that it's necessary to essentially subsidize a certain quality of life for Americans.
FWIW, it's usually termed "general" labor rather than "dumb" labor. You're point here seems to contradict your previous point that immigration also brings down the wages of skilled jobs. They way they do both is if they are represented in both skilled and unskilled employees.
As far as construction, this is largely region-dependent. (That's why I put the south in the original response. It's especially reliant on immigrant labor.) A rough rule of thumb is that labor is 20-40% of construction cost. Regardless, in my region, immigrants are the bulk of skilled labor as well. Again, anecdotal, but once you peel back the thin veneer, you can see how much of the American lifestyle relies on immigrant labor. And simply banning them in the hope that it increases housing availability will have many second order effects.
This is especially true for cities, as that is where migrants obviously want to go and where new construction is much harder. Pretending that it is somehow not the case, is making things just worse and worse.
They benefit directly from the cheap labor (even child-cheap labor [1]), from the depressed wages, and indirectly from the enlarged voter base of their political friends.
When you deflect the conversation towards racism and related name-calling, you're acting as an agent on behalf of the lords, doing exactly what they want you to do [2]: flinging mud at other peasants, rather than at the lords themselves.
I think one of the best ways to avoid being agentized by the elite class is to just be more skeptical in general, especially when you encounter emotional argumentation. Accusations of racism in particular is a huge red flag. This tactic is by design intended to shut down a discussion rather than engage with it.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/child-labor-is...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28415546 - It is far better for upper class to ensure that people discuss and focus on issues like gender and skin colour than the class differences. Hence, they ensured that this is the issue plebs would hear all over on the media and shift their attention from class divides to gender and skin colour.
Is it racist to blame the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property and funding the politicians that let them do it, while also pushing for more immigration? I don't really think the comment was blaming immigrants, it was blaming immigration, and it's honestly really hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that adding more people to a place that already doesn't have enough housing for people won't make the problem worse.
I don't understand how you could think millions of people coming over here couldn't affect the supply side of supply and demand, but considering your list of grievances I think it's pretty clear where you lie on the political spectrum and couldn't possibly blame immigration for anything.
Point me towards where people are "hoarding" property. Rental units don't count as they still contribute to the housing supply.
Wages have also been depressed for a long time by immigrant labor, from illegal immigration to H1Bs. Healthcare costs are, again, increased by (illegal) immigration. Illegal immigrants can go to the ER, get treated for free, and we're all stuck with the costs.
None of these are the only causes, but it's a contributing factor and one side of the political spectrum won't acknowledge it and the other pretends to while still allowing it for big businesses' sake.
Besides, those immigrants are the ones building those houses.
People taking up rental units still take up supply. If landlords are having a hard time renting out their units, they aren't going to increase their prices.
But US is not a small country, how can there be not enough land?
My wife is an accountant and I'm a programmer/photographer and the best we could afford is worse house on a lot 1/4 the size. There literally aren't lots that size around anymore. Usually when one goes up for sale a developer will buy it.
Sure, there's farmland in the area - but the farmers are using that.
In previous generations, with only one parent working, it is almost impossible to compete.
> It’s unsustainable and people think you’re a racist for bringing it up so it never gets talked about.
Not to mention 3.7M live births in the US last year - and I know for a fact not a single one of those freeloaders has a job.
Second, if we're already at a deficit how does it make sense to throw more fuel on the fire?
First, undocumented migrants intercepted at the border by CBP (which is what your source counts) are particularly unlikely to have more children in the United States. Second, the CBP report your source is based on counts encounters, not people, and notes “The large number of expulsions during the pandemic has contributed to a higher-than-usual number of migrants making multiple border crossing attempts, which means that total encounters somewhat overstate the number of unique individuals arriving at the border.”
We don't know what the true number is and that's part of the problem. If we're letting an unknown number of people in we aren't controlling for housing demand. All we have hard data on are how many are added to the immigration court backlog.
We have a pretty good idea, but it doesn't mostly come from border encounter tallies like the onrs you've cited.
> If we're letting an unknown number of people in we aren't controlling for housing demand.
Except for a sharp drop during the pandemic and a rebound to nearly the prior level afterwards, the illegally-present population has been basically flat for years, and on a longer term declining since, IIRC, the mid-late 00s.
That sounds about right? Most housing units will house 2-3 people, and a lot will house quite a few more. Obv this excludes natural population growth, but Canada's fertility rate is lower than most of Europe, and one of the lowest in the Western world, so that's probably not a problem.
So does having a large plot of land to every single driver on the road driving past you. Even if it doesn't really show up in a municipal budget or in a mortgage payment, it's still very expensive to drive past a farm that is wide and not deep, but most people, most of the time don't want deep lots for aesthetic reasons, and even if you make deep lots taxi-cab geometry will get you anyway if the whole area is residential land anyway.
When it comes to residential land that is outside of environmentally protected zones, my position is simple. Allow land owners to build two or three houses. One primary one (6 bedrooms, say) and up to two smaller ones (2 bedrooms each) or one smaller one and one general use building (a workshop or many car garage). That way the frontage is used, we get housing stock for poorer families and we intermix ages and income levels in a way that is socially beneficial, since it's a lot harder to turn a blind eye to the problems of the lower-middle class if they're literally living on the same property that you own.
Plus it gives a way (for families that want it) for grandparents to live on the same land as their grandchildren without always being in the hair of their kids. Super win-win if both parents work and can rely on the grandparents for after-school hours. Plus it makes extended family gatherings more feasible as enough of a chunk of the family is nearby in the first place.
Yeah what's unsustainable is you living on 15 acres, we can build housing for everyone.
> Canada built 321,000 units of housing in 2021 but is in pace to have over 500,000 immigrants this year.
Given, unlike you, they need to be considered productive by the government to move to Canada, why would they not be allowed to be here?
Heaven forbid I live on 1/4 of the land that my parents had even though I have a far greater income. I guess I shouldn't have bought the place? Or I should somehow subdivide the lot even though it's quite narrow and hilly/forested? Fuck nature, I guess.
> Given, unlike you, they need to be considered productive by the government to move to Canada, why would they not be allowed to be here?
That was literally the point of my post, but because you didn't seem to get it: because that amount might be so high as to drive housing costs further up when people are already struggling to rent/buy a home. A government should serve its own people, first and foremost. If that means immigration helps them (as it absolutely can) - great! If it means that too much immigration instead hurts their citizens, it should be dialed back.
Yeah what's unsustainable for the planet is you living on 15 acres in a 3000 sqft detached house, we can build housing for everyone.
> Canada built 321,000 units of housing in 2021 but is in pace to have over 500,000 immigrants this year.
Given, unlike you, they need to be considered productive by the government to move to Canada, why would they not be allowed to be here?
Not everywhere should be a suburban hellscape. For what it's worth my parent's lot where I grew up was 60 acres. Now there's no way you'd be able to buy something like that unless you were super patient and had ridiculous sums of money for the area. Again, there's less land for how many people there are.
What should I do? Plop more houses on my lot just to increase the housing supply?
There is no housing availability crisis in rural and small town America, though obviously everyone can't have 15 acres. There are small towns across the US that would love some population growth and have plenty of housing available. The problem is that jobs are concentrated in cities with housing shortages.
And yes, there is a way to make housing more affordable without building more of it. That's the entire point of my post. Supply and demand has two sides.
There is absolutely a housing price crisis in at least some of rural America. My wife's brother has been looking for a house for years but everything he can find in his price range as a teacher (which are paid OK in MN) is a complete dump. This is in town, which in our area means it's the cheapest housing.