Citizens can choose to prioritize quality of life over maximizing housing stock to increase the domestic population. “We’re all full up.” It is their country after all, it is their choice. Those who want in are not stakeholders nor have a vote.
For every other product the default stance is to try to get maximum features out of minimum price. With housing its the literal opposite. People take pride in how expensive houses are. Houses are treated as investments because houses are expensive. People won't worry about houses getting cheaper after they bought it if houses were like a toothbrush or a razor blade. Give me reasons why housing shouldn't be turned into a product so cheap and by default decent quality that people buy and throw it? You may say its hard or impossible, but would you say its a bad goal in itself?
I don’t have to give you reasons, those putting forth these proposals have their reasons and potentially the votes required to pass it. Economic rationality or consideration of potential immigrants wanting inexpensive housing somewhere they aren’t a citizen are not factors.
If Switzerland doesn’t want high population density throughout their country for quality of life reasons, that’s a choice, through their votes. If you don’t have a vote, you don’t get a say. There’s 8B+ humans on the planet and that will peak between ~9-10B before the end of the century, not everyone is going to get to live where they want to live during their life and runtime on the timeline. Is it sad and/or unfortunate? It just is.
Its the opposite of quality of life. Immigrants are irrelevant to it. Higher housing costs benefit nobody, local or immigrant. In no place in earth are housing costs coming down, so no matter immigrant or not we need to build housing at a mass scale just to have a fighting chance against rising prices. Making this about immigrants is bullshit. Refusing to build houses is utter bullshit, its the opposite of quality of life. It leads to crap quality of life and then people whine and cry and ask for more self destructive crap further spiraling into crap. Making houses cheap benefits everyone, keeping houses expensive harms everyone.
Let us amend the plan of action. People proposing this policy should lead by example and kill themselves to show commitment to keeping population in check.
Then they should make death chambers for people if they think they are full. At 9 million people, they could choose to live nicely with 4000 sq m lots per person or they can keep crying about housing prices while not doing the one tried and tested solution capitalism offers to high prices. Even if we take out untenable mountain land, how much does that leave us? There is no place on earth that is lacking land for housing. Its a self created problem.
It's amazing how quickly globalists were able to get the ideological left to switch from having riots protesting against globalism to declaring it racist to have any anti-globalist thoughts. Even more amazing are the intellectual knots they'll tie themselves up into when explaining how this came to be. The participants of the Battle of Seattle in 1999 now would be considered Nazis.
> The participants of the Battle of Seattle in 1999 now would be considered Nazis.
Given that I participated in that back in 99, and have been called a Nazi three times over the past two weeks for anodyne views, you’re literally not wrong.
You're stating this option like it's obvious and simple, but this all just amounts to choosing which of multiple ways to make one's country worse. While growth/immigration has macro-economic positives, it's not infinitely positive, so it doesn't justify ever-denser housing and ever-increasing cultural sub-dividing forever - and as people become less happy, they care less and less about "how the economy is doing".
Of course, nobody can agree on where the line is, or escape the shoulder-rubbing with racism and classism while trying to argue where the line is.
The problem is that most people want to live in cities for whatever reason and, lo and behold, if one wants to buy regional and biological the grain has to grow somewhere on the countryside.
But yeah, most people have lost touch with where food comes from originally, before it's in the shelves of your supermarket.
It's much easier to blame the out group for your issues. The US currently has a sizable percentage of people that believe ICE deportations are going to lower housing prices, for example.
Immigrants make up 32.5% of construction workers[0] so without them we're unable to build new housing unless you have a solution to the falling birth rate and human capital. Also, they're more likely to reside with extended family or non-family members[1] (i.e. not eating up single family home supply)
So yes, while they might have some effect on housing supply, deporting them won't make a dent in prices. If you believe that deportations = cheaper houses, then I have a bridge to sell you. Too many localities have strict building regulations that artifically keep housing prices inflated; deportations won't do anything to fix that.
> Has changing zoning laws historically ever boosted housing construction by more than 10%
Certainly has in New Zealand - particularly in Christchurch and Auckland. The local politics are against densification - but the national politics have been ascendant. Over the last decade, New Zealand’s housing stock has grown by approximately 16%.
Densification has gone up in city centres - with broad political support from our left and right parlimentarians.
We must have more houses because our population is rising through immigration. Like many countries, we have too many retirees and not enough workers: so New Zealand is using immigration to patch that problem (particularly in healthcare and elderly care). Currently about 30% of our population was born in another country (gained residency or passport). It isn't a stable solution since working immigrants eventually get old too. The alternative is population growth which is also unstable in the long term (plus population growth is harder for the government to encourage).
There are many issues, and a lot of the same rhetoric you see in the US, but broadly immigration seems to be helping our economy.
If you're from the US, the state closest to NZ for population, size and weather would be Oregon (to give you a comparison).
I am happy with any method that increases housing, whether its government made housing programs or easing of zoning laws. Why see a conflict when both are contributing to the same goal?
I would prefer it if solutions which doubled housing constuction rates were promoted above solutions which housing developers lobbied the hardest for but which will barely move the needle.
They are also competing for the same land, which is the commodity that is actually in short supply.
