What J.D. Vance Just Said About Housing
He boiled the housing crisis down to zoning and immigration
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Yesterday, Vice President Vance addressed the National League of Cities. Heading into the speech, I anticipated a scolding about crime and social disorder in our cities, given the anti-urban tone of Trump’s campaign where he referred to Milwaukee as “horrible” and called Philadelphia “ravaged by bloodshed and crime.” Instead, Vance took the opportunity to talk about housing. Well, about immigration and housing, but more on that below.
The speech began with predictable promises of cutting regulation to reduce housing prices and exaggerations to blame Biden for the current housing problem. For example, Vance said that the median price of homes “more than doubled” during the Biden administration, when plenty of price appreciation occurred in 2020 when Trump was still president; even counting 2020, median prices have gone up by 47 percent, not more than 100 percent.
There was about one minute of Vance’s speech where our politics were aligned – when Vance said cities should get “a little smarter about zoning rules” and touted Austin for building enough housing supply to reduce housing costs.
But then Vance wrongly made immigrants the scapegoat for the housing crisis. Vance claimed that a “massive increase” in immigrants is pushing up housing prices by pitting immigrants against blue collar families for housing. (Another exaggeration: he used the number 20 million people to describe the number of immigrants, when most estimates put the number under 12 million.)
If immigrants were driving up prices, places like St. Louis, which led the country with its growth of foreign-born population in 2023, and Philadelphia, which now has the highest percentage immigrant population since the 1940s, would be the poster children of the affordability crisis. Instead, both have median housing prices under $300,000 — way less than the national average — and sit in the top five undervalued markets in the country.