WASHINGTON – Sen. JD Vance claims that migrants are contributing to a housing shortage in the U.S. But experts say the issue is complicated, prompting disagreement about the driving factor.
During the Tuesday Vice Presidential debate, both candidates agreed on the need for more housing construction in the U.S. According to a Zillow analysis, the U.S. faced a shortage of 4.5 million housing units in 2022.
Vance attributed the crisis to illegal immigration, a position that contrasted sharply with Walz’s approach. The Minnesota governor pushed back against Vance, saying that “we can’t blame immigrants,” and focused on addressing housing supply concerns by proposing building three million homes over four years.
“Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” Vance said, according to CBS’s debate transcript.
Andrew Trueblood, a senior advisor at the nonpartisan think tank D.C. Policy Center, said he has not seen rigorous evidence that immigration is the leading cause of the housing shortage or rising costs. He attributed the shortage to a number of factors, including the period after the Great Recession of 2008, when construction declined significantly.
“There’s a series of factors that have caused this crisis… like zoning laws don’t allow housing,” Trueblood said. “And then you add more recently higher interest rates, which make housing costs higher, which makes it more expensive to build.”
According to Jung Choi, a Principal Research Associate for the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, it is difficult for undocumented immigrants to find housing in the United States because the majority of them do not have social security numbers (SSN), but rather Individual Taxpayer identification numbers (ITIN).
A report by the Urban Institute highlights that while there are some financial products available for noncitizens, the majority of traditional mortgage options require a SSN.
Choi explained that due to the challenges many undocumented immigrants face in accessing housing, they are more likely to live in “shared households” with individuals who have legal status.
Pew Research Center revealed that approximately 70% of undocumented immigrants live in mixed-status households, where at least one person has legal status, which suggests their impact on housing costs are minimal.
Experts also pointed to the large percentage of undocumented immigrants that make up the construction industry. The left-leaning Center for American Progress estimates that about 23% of construction workers are undocumented.
Fewer immigrants “could increase the labor cost of building houses, which could also have a negative impact on housing supply,” Choi said.
While neither analyst can support a presidential candidate, both agree that Harris’s housing proposals, which focus on building new houses and providing incentives to state and local municipalities to do so, are steps to alleviate the current supply issue.
“We [The Urban Institute] think that the Trump campaign needs to look at this from a holistic point of view and really understand the housing situation undocumented immigrants are living in to come up with a good estimate of the impact of these policies, which from what I see in the data, is likely very limited,” Choi said.
Despite Trueblood’s remarks, some economists suggest that immigration plays a role in the cost of housing expenses.
Among them were remarks from Michelle W. Bowman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, which Vance shared after the debate. Bowman noted that an influx of new immigrants to certain areas could place upward pressure on rents as housing supply lags behind demand.
