The national housing deficit remained at 4.7 million units in 2024, rising by just 43,000 homes, according to a new Zillow report based on US Census Bureau data.
Zillow attributed the steady deficit level to a homebuilding boom that increased the total number of housing units by about 1.4 million in 2024, coupled a 50-year high for newly finished multifamily homes. The company added that the share of for-sale listings on Zillow that were affordable to a median-income household was roughly 33%, unchanged year-over-year.
The most severe housing deficits were in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, DC. While 35% of for-sale listings in May were affordable to a median-income household nationwide, the shares are far lower in four of the five markets with the biggest deficits.
“The country is not yet building its way out of the hole, but we stopped digging,” said Orphe Divounguy, senior economist at Zillow. “Behind every missing home is a family doubling up, unable to find or afford a place of their own. Stopping the bleeding is progress, but making a real dent requires more than the status quo. We need flexible zoning to allow for more density, streamlined permitting and support for manufactured housing. It’s been encouraging to see a bipartisan emphasis from Congress in finding solutions to the housing affordability crisis, because this is an issue that matters to everyone.”
Well, we still have about 50 million illegals here, blue cities and states raising taxes to steal money and give welfare to illegals, artificially high interest rates for no reason but to hurt Americians…and no one ever explains exactly what the “housing deficit” actually is. This is a “crisis” created by those who want to “solve” it.
A recent working paper released by two economists working for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has suggested that illegal migration over the Biden years contributed to as much as a 20% growth in recent years and a whopping 30% increase in housing prices over the last five years.
The paper, titled “The Impacts of Unauthorized Immigration on U.S. Labor and Housing Markets: New Evidence from Administrative Microdata,” provides strong evidence to support the claim that illegal migration has not only worsened an affordability crisis in America, but is one of its key drivers.
For years, America has faced a chronic shortage of housing, a problem that is most acute in metropolitan areas where the number of new homes being built has severely lagged the skyrocketing demand.
In the years Biden occupied the Oval Office, hordes of illegals – to the tune of, at least, 15 million – entered the homeland. This placed severe pressure on an already tight and inelastic housing market.
The paper concluded that every 1% addition of illegal aliens to a local area’s initial employment raised rents in that area by 1.4%, while increasing housing prices by 2.2%.
In certain key metro areas, such as Houston, Miami, New York, and Minneapolis, where the concentration of illegal migrant inflows was disproportionate to the national average, those housing markets would experience an especially pronounced uptick.
The result of this distressing trend was that ordinary Americans, particularly new homebuyers and young people, were literally being squeezed out of housing altogether because of the seismic pressures introduced by illegal aliens.
In past generations, Americans would only have to compete among themselves for housing. Housing followed a typical supply and demand relationship – where greater demand was often manageable because new housing could be easily built, without encumbering supply chains too much.
In recent years, that logic has been totally upended. First, loose monetary policy has expanded the money supply. The effect of quantitative easing has driven up housing prices far beyond the demand.
The inflation this caused has been exacerbated further by a restricted housing supply, which has been slow to rebound since the COVID-19 pandemic devastated supply chains nationwide.
This in turn further worsened a problem that had been ongoing for years due to burdensome regulations, red-tape, and excess bureaucracy in the housing market.
The effect of opening America’s borders and letting in the third world during an already unmanageable housing crisis was like adding gasoline to the fire.
The market effects have been catastrophic: new home buyers have been potentially delayed from purchasing their first home by decades. Many have been forced out of the market entirely.
The problems arising from illegal aliens do not just stop at the supply and demand curve: more people cause more strains on local infrastructure, resulting in setbacks and unintended deterioration of said supply.
Thank you We The People for your detailed fact regarding the real cause of the housing shortage. When over 15M new people are overwhelming the housing market, particularly the low or entry level homes, it’s no surprise US citizens are pushed out of the market.
It’s all because of Biden’s illegals.
Sounds like 15,000 million residential sales to folks actually doing the building. The housing market goes up and it goes down. Trump has removed 1.5 million people from their homes in 18 months. Face it, white people didn’t buy their homes. If they did, the neighborhoods would be gentrified and the prices would soar even higher. You’re Realtors. Read your ethics and fair housing laws. Be civil.