It’s usually worth thinking about, because at least you’ll learn something. Here is a hate-worthy paragraph from one of my old Bloomberg columns:
…note that rising house prices, to the extent that they result from immigrant demand, largely translate into capital gains for homeowners – most of whom are native-born. Certainly, rising house prices could be bad for many young Canadians, who could be priced out of the real estate market, but many of them will end up inheriting high-value homes from their parents.
And yet it is true. “Immigrants driving up housing prices” should not be a major concern, even if it creates some distributive problems (is this the main way to get conservatives to worry about distributive problems? ).
With a little effort, perhaps we can strengthen the aversion to this argument. I often hear: “Oh, it would be nice if we welcomed a lot of immigrants. But the more there are, the more we need YIMBY to host them at a reasonable cost. »
Maybe! But let’s not forget the terms of trade models for international trade. If one of our export industries is “selling houses to arriving foreigners”, you may want your sellers to collude, restrict production and raise prices for foreigners. At least if you maximize the welfare of the initial natives.
And that’s precisely what NIMBY policies do: by imposing a kind of implicit collusion, they force arrivals to pay more for their housing. Pay more to the natives, of course.
Raise your hand if you’re against capital gains!
Of course, the cosmopolitans among us can solve these problems quite easily.
