this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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It seems a bit odd to me that the solution is "fewer people" instead of "more housing"
Why not both?
There is no downside to building homes for everyone. There are downsides to not having a large population. More people can be beneficial economically, geopolitically, and socially.
There are significant downsides to a large population, some of which are a function of the buildings required to house them, like how you supply all those homes with electricity. There is absolutely such a thing as too many people and such a thing as too many buildings and/or buildings which are too large.
And we're nowhere close to those theoretical absolute limits, and likely will never get there as a species.
But not being able to build homes fast enough to match the population growth is detrimental though.
So build more homes.
You can't scale that overnight, it takes time to train the new workforce to achieve that.
Sure. So get started.
Liberal politician: we hear your complaints about how little affordable homes there are, thats why we are introducing a new dental care plan for seniors!
It doesn't cost anything to have less people. It costs lots to build houses and infrastructure to support those people.
It also takes time to build out housing and infrastructure but pasuing growth can be done almost instantly politically speaking.
Both are required to drop the price and return to affordability as building new housing takes time and has hard limitations.
The reality is that the level of immigration should be dictated by the level of new housing and overall service and infrastructure investment. If you add people without alignment to these you're just degrading the housing security, quality of service, and overall quality of life for the vast majority of existing residents.
This also means that millions of immigrants could be accommodated per year if the level of new housing and investment were sufficiently high enough.
But government can do much to speed it up. Why are we just taking the rate of new housing as a given, and not taking the rate of new immigration as a given?
They can mandate and make laws but they can't make more framers, plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc. We can train more but there will still be a 2-4 year gap which leaves us another 1M houses behind. There has to be a combination of increased construction, increased services, and reduction of population growth. Once prices of and access to housing and other services normalized then open the doors again but try to tie the population growth to the growth of infrastructure.
Why not try to tie the growth of infrastructure to the population growth?
When you control both it make sense to do so but there isn't the manpower, right now, to do so. Even when we get enough people to support that much construction the wages are not that great and the work literally destroys your body. Not many people want to do it and the ones who do can't do it for long.
Wth so much demand for housing, wages should be pretty good? Here in California we have a housing crisis but construction wages are good, especially for skilled workers.
Depending on the trade construction is 25-35 an hour for the grunt work, around 40 for electrical/hvac/plumbing. In an industrial job you can get 25 bucks to push a broom and >45 in the maintenance department.