President Joe Biden is complaining “rents are too high” after he deliberately imported 10 million rent-spiking legal and illegal migrants into Americans’ neighborhoods.
The sudden, election-year complaint was posted on March 14 by Politico.com, which did not mention Biden’s decision to import millions of new immigrant-renters:
Biden has repeatedly pressed his senior staff for new ways to make homes more affordable and available, quizzing aides on mortgage rates and rental prices. He’s also demanded details on the burden that housing inflation has placed on families’ monthly budgets, according to two senior White House officials, who were granted anonymity to describe private conversations.
He’s told advisers that the challenge of affording a home is the main complaint he hears from voters when he travels. “Rents are too high. People can’t buy their first [house],” said one of the senior officials, recounting the worries Biden has had over lack of supply and high interest rates in meetings dating back to the summer. “People are stuck where they are.”
“It completely shapes and transforms your life,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told Politico. “It affects how [constituents] think about politics, and it affects how they vote.”
But the Politico ignored the housing price spikes — and voters’ resulting anger — are largely caused by Biden’s policy of mass migration.
Since 2021, Biden has welcomed roughly seven million southern migrants, roughly two million legal immigrants, and at least two million white-collar and blue-collar temporary workers. The inflow is greater than the number of children being born to Americans.
The massive inflow has allowed landlords to raise rents — and it has also created a “demand shock” that has spiked prices and tangled the construction industry.
“Rents in suburbs had climbed 26% through this past July since March 2020,” the Wall Street Journal reported in September:
In St. Charles, Mo., about half an hour from downtown St. Louis, tenants started moving in last month to Chapter at the Streets, a new 245-unit apartment building …. The St. Charles market is being driven by population growth, low levels of new rental supply and a difficult home-sales market.
“Rental prices are unaffordable for a record number of Americans, with half of all renters paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities,” PBS reported on February 8:
Rising rents are also spiking the inflation that has eroded Biden’s support: “U.S. consumer prices rose more than expected in January amid a surge in the cost of rental housing,” according to a February 13 report by Reuters.
The link between Biden’s migration and Americans’ rising rents is quietly admitted by migration advocates, even as powerless reporters at Politico, PBS, and elsewhere remain silent about the contradiction in progressives’ priorities. For example, the Politico article does not make any references to migration, even though other establishment sites admit the link.
“The increase in immigration likely increased demand for rental housing, which takes time to build, and thus put upward pressure on rents in some ‘areas,” said a March report by The Hamilton Project, which is very establishment.
“Immigration … was particularly important for urban counties in 2022, serving as the largest source of growth for nearly three-quarters of the central counties of large metro areas,” said a September post by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
“Immigration was the main factor slowing or reversing population losses in large metros in the Northeast and Midwest after an exodus during the pandemic,” the Wall Street Journal reported March 14:
Nationwide, counties that form the core of the 50 largest metro areas last year gained 122,000 people, or 0.1%, reversing a small loss the previous year, the analysis shows. Those counties saw 566,000 net arrivals from abroad last year, up 15% from a year earlier, as immigration approached prepandemic levels.
Breitbart News has posted many reports showing housing prices rising in line with migration in New York, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland.
So far, GOP candidates and committees have ignored the political opportunity created by Biden’s migration damage to the housing market. In part, that silence is driven by the GOP’s close alliance with the real estate industry and its many bipartisan donors.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), however, is a notable exception:
Biden has not suggested he will slow his immigration spike to help swing-voting Americans families buy homes or rent apartments.
Instead, he and his deputies are pushing housing companies to build more high-density housing, even in l0w-density suburbs. “The bottom line is we have to build, build, build,” Biden said, according to Politico.
In practice, ramping up housing production — especially amid Biden’s rapid immigration — is difficult and slow, leaving Democrats with little choice than louder PR during the 2024 election.
Biden and his campaign aides, according to Politico, “are planning to ramp up their messaging on the issue, hoping that acknowledging the problem and promising to solve it in a second term will ease voters’ dissatisfaction.”
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