Illegal aliens living in New York City, New York will soon be eligible to rent subsidized housing, which is already limited in quantity amid a homeless crisis and skyrocketing rents.
This week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio rolled out new eligibility rules that will allow the city’s some 725,000 illegal alien residents to apply for subsidized, affordable housing — which has historically been reserved for American taxpayers.
The rules will no longer mandate that those applying to live in affordable housing show their credit rating, a legitimate Social Security number, and documents proving them to be a taxpayer. Instead, applicants will only have to prove that they paid rent on time every month for a year, a plan that is likely to allow thousands of illegal aliens to obtain affordable housing units over American citizens.
De Blasio has hoped to increase the number of affordable housing units to 300,000 by 2026, a limited amount for a city with more than 8.5 million residents, the majority of whom are renters who have had to deal with increasing housing prices.
Already, as Bloomberg News notes, the city receives more than 500 applications for each available affordable housing unit that currently exists with the stricter rules. That number is expected to significantly increase when the new rules open the application process to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and temporary foreign workers on various visa programs, shutting out more and more Americans from cheaper housing.
The country’s mass illegal and legal immigration policy of the last four decades has greatly driven population growth in the country’s largest cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. As a result, experts — including former federal immigration official Lou Di Leonardo — say rents and housing prices sour with increased competition for affordable housing.
Leonardo wrote in the San Fransisco Chronicle:
Just like everyone else, immigrants need places to live. Their demand for a limited supply of apartments and houses drives up rents, especially in metropolitan areas where immigrants tend to concentrate. Curbing immigration levels would do more than any welfare program to ensure that working-class Americans can afford the roofs over their heads. [Emphasis added]
Take the Bay Area, for example. Immigrants account for roughly 36% of the population. The average home was valued around $1.34 million last year.San Francisco’s housing prices have risen so rapidly that one U.N. official called it a “human rights violation.” [Emphasis added]
In Los Angeles, where immigrants make up 35% of the population, home values shot up 50% in the past five years. Nine in ten homes are now unaffordable to the average L.A. resident. [Emphasis added]
As of 2017, New York City is now home to more than three million foreign-born residents — making up about 37 percent of the total city’s population. This indicates that there are more foreign-born residents living in New York City today than there are people living in Chicago, Illinois; San Diego, California; and Houston, Texas.
Coinciding with illegal and legal immigration that has increased New York City’s population, one-bedroom rents in the city, as well as two-bedroom rents, have grown to astronomical levels. The latest analysis by Zumper finds that median one-bedroom New York City rent is about $3,050 a month, growing 3.7 percent in August and beating out the last three-year, all-time high of median rents in June, which came in at $2,980 a month.
Two-bedroom monthly rents in New York City also grew more than two percent this month, increasing the median rate to about $3,450 for the city’s residents.
Currently, there is an estimated record high of 44.5 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S. This is nearly quadruple the immigrant population in 2000. The vast majority of those arriving every year arrive through the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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