Rents Spike for Americans as Biden’s Migrants Fill Apartments

Half of American renters — or 25 million people — now spend more than 30 percent of their pre-tax income on housing amid President Joe Biden’s wage-cutting, rent-spiking welcome for mass migration.

“The national average rent-to-income (RTI) reached 30% for the first time in our 20+ years of tracking history, up 1.5% from year-ago,” said a housing report by the Wall Street firm of Moody’s Analytics.

“Rent … rose faster than incomes” in 75 metro areas, according to the report.

Back in 1999, rents consumed roughly 22.5 percent of the median income, the report said.

The median income is the mid-point in wages: Half of Americans earn more, and half earn less, than the median income.

“These trends on wages not keeping up with rents are exactly what anyone with a morsel of common sense knows will happen if immigration levels are too high,” said Andrew Good, at NumbersUSA.com. He added:

The American Dream for today’s Americans will only be pushed further out of reach unless we get serious about changing course. It is critically important that we reduce immigration unless we want to [change from] a middle class nation to a nation of renters.”

Since the 1970s, rents have risen in every state as Congress expanded the resident population of immigrants, especially after Congress doubled legal immigration in 1990. That immigrant population has grown from roughly 30 million in 1999 to almost 50 million in early 2023. The inflow raised housing costs just as inflation pumps up gasoline prices.

Rents rose by 8.7 percent in 2021 and 9 percent in 2022 as Biden’s huge inflow of roughly 3 million southern migrants pooled their low incomes to rent houses and apartments.

In contrast, rents rose by 3.6 percent per year during President Donald Trump’s low-migration term.

Coronavirus out-migration from major cities did reduce rent pressure in some major cities, the Moody’s Analytics report said. But “the South Atlantic and Southwest experienced the opposite due to strong in-migration,” the report noted.

For example, to keep pace with rising rents, wages would have to rise by more than 9.3 percent in Knoxville, Tennessee, 75 percent in Chattanooga, 8.9 percent in Charleston, South Carolina, and 6.6 percent in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, the report noted.

Rents in the South Atlantic states consumed almost 25 percent of median income, up from 21.8 percent in 2019.

Homes are cheaper in the low-migration midwest and southwest, where rents consumed 20 percent and 19 percent of median pre-tax income. But even in the south, many Americans are being pushed out of their homes. In Arizona, Scottsdale Realtors.com reported on January 14:

For the past few months, Morgan Rice has called Coconino National Forest home.

Rice and his girlfriend — along with their dog, Rio, and their cat, Kit — have been camping full-time in their 32-foot, 2006 Ford diesel van since August. When monthly rent for their one-bedroom apartment in Avondale increased from around $800 to over $1,300, the couple simply couldn’t keep up.

“They outpriced us,” Rice said.

Yet Democrats continue to push for more migration, even though the rising rents are forcing young Americans to delay marriage and move back to their parent’s homes.

“We have a [U.S.] population that is not reproducing on its own,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) ADMITTED in November, before calling for even more migration:

The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the dreamers and all of them — because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers [illegals who were brought in by their parents] get a path to citizenship for all 11 million — or however many undocumented there are here [emphasis added].

New York rents take almost 70 percent of the median wage, yet Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is urging more migration into her high-rent, low-wage district.  On January 25, she and almost 80 other Democrats signed a letter to President Joe Biden asking for more migration:

We believe that your administration can and must continue to expand legal pathways for migrants and refugees into the United States — without further dismantling the right to seek asylum at our border.

The demand for more migration is also pushed by GOP donors, especially donors with large real-estate holdings.

Moody’s report, however, did not break out the impact caused by President Joe Biden’s policy of easy migration, which has added roughly 4 million legal and illegal migrants during 2022.

The Moody’s report was covered by the New York Times, but it also suppressed mention of immigration as it sketched rising costs:

“We’ve been moving in this direction for decades,” said Martha Galvez, the executive director of the Housing Solutions Lab at New York University’s Furman Center. “Since the ’70s, rents have been rising faster than incomes. And among lower-income households, high rent burdens have been the norm for a long time.”

Since January 2021, Biden’s migration has added at least 4 million southern migrants to the United States population, not counting at least two million legal immigrants and visa workers. Assuming six people per apartment, that’s an extra demand for roughly 700,000 apartments in two years when only 800,000 new apartments were completed.

Academic research says immigration drives up rents — and also spikes housing prices in nearby locations as Americans flee from the civic impact of the new migrants.

“Using data that span from 2002–2012, we find, as have others, that immigration inflows are associated with rising rents and prices,” according to a March 2017 study of almost 300 “Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), titled “Immigration and housing: A spatial econometric analysis.” The summary reported:

An increase in the number of immigrants equal to 1 percent of an MSA’s total population was linked with a 0.8 percent increase in rents and a 0.8 percent increase in home prices.

This same increase in immigrants was associated with a 1.6 percent rise in rents and a 9.6 percent rise in home prices in surrounding MSAs.

Investors and analysts recognize the link between migration and housing costs — even as they also try to minimize public understanding of the link. For example, in 2018, an article in a real-estate publication noted that “immigration will be necessary to fuel multifamily housing demand.”

Immigrants now comprise roughly 14 percent — or one in seven — of all residents in the United States. That inflow has helped to spike rents and housing costs in California and other coastal states, especially when politicians and builders jointly roll back suburban zoning rules.

Biden’s multi-mullion person inrush is expected to continue in 2023 — and will likely push rents even higher amid a likely record production of 300,000 new apartments.

New York rents demand the largest share of median income, or almost 70 percent of the median wage, the report said. San Francisco fell to eighth place as prices surged in high-migration cities, such as Miami, Los Angeles, and Boston.

The report noted:

At the state level, three states topped the 30% rent-burdened threshold similar to Q3: Massachusetts (32.9%), Florida (32.6%), and New York (31.2%).

Over the past three years, Nevada (+4.9%), Florida (+4.8%), Alabama (+4.2%), South Carolina (+4.2%), Arizona (+4.1%), and New Mexico (4.0%) all experienced the highest increase in the state’s average rent burdening, attributed to significantly higher [greater than] (>~20%) rent growth than respective median household income growth during the three-year period.

But affordability declined the most in southern states, the report said. “Median household incomes were … not keeping pace with the rent growth, creating the biggest disparity in growth rates among all regions,” the report said:

The federal government has long operated an economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.

Breitbart