Kamala Harris Promises to Calm Housing Crisis that She Helped Create

https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/MigrantsHousingNewYork/a3a346a4ced4473dba4b7bbb85da2d88/pho
Andres Kudacki/AP, Lawrence Jackson/White House
Neil Munro

Democrat presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris wants voters to think she will reduce the painful cost of housing as she hides her support for the mass immigration that causes housing inflation.

“On day one, I will work to take on price gouging and bring down costs … we will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases,” she declared to supporters at her first campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 30, 2024.

“She’s saying it because she’ll say anything to get elected,” responded Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Even if curbs were politically possible at the federal, state, or local levels, they would not force down housing prices amid continued mass immigration, Krikorian added. “It’ll just result in an even tighter housing market” and even higher prices, he told Breitbart News.

“This is not regular politician-style lying,” he added. “Nobody believes that [President Barack] Obama was against gay marriage, and nobody believes that [Donald] Trump is against abortion — that’s normal political sleaziness. Vice President Harris — on a whole bunch of issues, on immigration, specifically — is different in kind [by pushing] a socio-sociopathic disregard for the truth itself.”

The housing issue is politically important because many young voters are growing poorer as housing eats more of their monthly budgets.

“Over 22 million households now spend more than a third of their income on rent, and home mortgage rates have soared since 2022,” Vox reported on August 6.

The Wall Street Journal reported on August 12:

Housing is by far the biggest monthly expense for U.S. households. In the CPI [Consumer Price Index], shelter costs—a measure of rent and the equivalent cost to homeowners, as well as lodging away from home and household insurance—have risen more than 13% in two years.

When a family’s $3,000 rent or mortgage payment jumps 13%, that dings the bank account by about $400 a month.

President Joe Biden’s deputies are touting token remedies before the November election. On August 13, for example, the White House announced a plan to spend $100 million to speed up approvals for new construction.

However, the administration largely created the crisis by importing roughly ten million immigrants since 2021 via legal, illegal, and quasi-legal routes.  Moreover, Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, says he has the legal authority and the moral right to import many more people.

RELATED EXCLUSIVE: Large Group of Immigrants from Many Nations Crosses Border into Arizona

Randy Clark / Breitbart

Since 2021, Harris has done little to curb Mayorkas’s pro-migration policies. Politico wrote on August 10:

Harris, too, resisted taking ownership of immigration; when Biden charged her with managing the troubled Northern Triangle countries in Central America, Harris bristled at the implication that she had a direct role to play in fixing the border.

Harris’s campaign speeches ignore the link between immigration and housing costs.

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump’s speeches and campaign staff, however, are stepping into the issue.

“Housing costs are skyrocketing, absolutely skyrocketing, because we have 15 million new migrants,” Trump said in an Arizona speech in June. “We have no place to put them, and that number is growing so that we have absolutely no place.”

His campaign is also spotlighting the housing damage done to U.S. veterans:

“There are 20 million illegal aliens who shouldn’t be here and who are competing with Americans for scarce homes,” Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), told Fox News on August 6. “Kamala Harris has supported higher interest rates, which makes mortgages totally unaffordable for most people. So, these policies make ordinary people suffer … she’s putting the interests of illegal aliens above American citizens.”

Immigration Spikes Housing Costs

Outside the United States, voters recognize the link between immigration and housing costs, said Krikorian.

“Here it just hasn’t been [publicized] very much,” he added. “Sen. Vance brought it up a number of months ago, but that’s probably the most high-profile example of that. Part of the reason is that we’re such a big country [that] people just imagine there’s plenty of room to spread out. They don’t take into account that immigrants don’t settle half an inch thick across the country. They go to the most densely populated metro areas.”

In the United States, many officials and experts admit that Biden’s mass migration is pushing up rents and housing prices, including for white-collar workers in areas with few immigrant residents.

Immigrants raised the value of U.S. housing by $3.7 trillion from 2000 to 2010, according to the pro-migration New American Economy advocacy group. Admittedly, much of that extra value evaporated once the 2008 recession ended the ability of many poor Americans and immigrants to pay their monthly mortgage bills.

“Using data that span from 2002–2012, we find, as have others, that immigration inflows are associated with rising rents and prices,” according to a March 2017 study of almost 300 “Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA),” titled “Immigration and housing: A spatial econometric analysis.” The summary reported:

An increase in the number of immigrants equal to 1 percent of an MSA’s total population was linked with a 0.8 percent increase in rents and a 0.8 percent increase in home prices.

This same increase in immigrants was associated with a 1.6 percent rise in rents and a 9.6 percent rise in home prices in surrounding MSAs.

As immigrants move into an MSA, natives tend to move to surrounding MSAs, indicating that the spillover effects may be driven by native-population movements.

“You’re talking about housing specifically,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told Vance at a July 9 hearing, adding: “I’m sure there are places in the country where new people coming into the country … will have contributed to an already tight housing market.”

Biden has “infused millions of [immmigrant] people into society, and they need places to stay, also, so the competition for these places goes up, which, of course, drives the price up,” Ben Carson, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, told Breitbart News.

“Global Migration Boom Keeps Housing Costs High: Surging immigration is boosting rents and supporting home prices, complicating inflation flight,” said the headline above a July 2023 article in the Wall Street Journal.

Even the very pro-establishment Axios admitted the link with a September 2023 headline, “Migrant surge makes U.S. housing crisis worse.” If distinct groups of people are competing for the same housing, “I think there’s a real risk that the flames of xenophobia get fanned,” New York City Comptroller Brad Lander told Axios.

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