How mass immigration is worsening the housing crisis – The Spectator

Similar but harsher debate to that in Canada with of course UK particularities, particularly with respect to social housing:

…In England, to put this in context, it means that last year we only built around one-third of the homes that we now need to build because of immigration. We should be able to talk about this openly. We should be able to talk about how immigration is fuelling the housing crisis, driving up house prices and making many homes unaffordable for British families and British workers.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what researchers at the University of Oxford recently said:

‘ … there is some evidence that migration is likely to have increased house prices in the UK. For example, the Migration Advisory Committee (2018) found that a 1-percentage point increase in the UK’s population due to migration increased house prices by 1% … Their finding was broadly consistent with other modelling by the former MHCLG (2018) and the Office for Budget Responsibility (Auterson, 2014).’

In fact, there’s more evidence than people like to think. In Spain, for example, a recent study found that a 1-point increase in the rate of immigration increases average house sale prices by 3.3 per cent (as did this one). And, while in Britain, one (older) study suggested immigration lowers house prices, this was only because more affluent locals ended up selling their homes and leaving their communities altogether, no doubt alarmed at what was unfolding.

Record immigration has not only been driving up house prices; it’s also been pushing up rents in the private rental market, something that becomes immediately obvious to anybody who has had to attend a viewing with some two dozen other applicants.

The fact that, in 2022, net migration is estimated to have added at least half a million people to England’s already absurd rental market is something most pro-immigration lobbyists, MPs, academics, and columnists, who usually live in their own homes, made possible by privileged parents, are unlikely to ever encounter.

…Mass immigration is also piling enormous pressure on Britain’s social housing sector, which used to be reserved for impoverished British nationals who had been paying into the collective pot for years and who had long roots in their local communities.

Today, however, things are very different. Nationally, as the Migration Observatory points out, between 2019 and 2021, 16 per cent of UK-born people were living in social housing compared to 17 per cent of the foreign-born. That figure then climbs to 19 per cent among people born in Pakistan or elsewhere in South Asia, and then to a striking 30 per cent among the rising number of typically low-skilled migrants who were born in sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom have also been shown to be a net fiscal cost, rather than benefit, to the British economy.

In London, almost half (48 per cent) of all social housing is now occupied by households that are headed by somebody who was not born in Britain. The most common households are headed by somebody who was born in Africa (18.4 per cent), the Middle East and Asia (11.7 per cent), or elsewhere in Europe (8.7 per cent).

…All of which raises a number of important questions that you would ordinarily expect to be addressed and answered by our political leaders: Why are so many young British people, workers, and their families forced to pay half their monthly income if not more to live out in the periphery, in places like London’s Zone 4 or beyond, sitting on expensive, packed and dirty commuter trains while wondering why they and other Brits are having to subsidise newcomers, who are frequently economically inactive?

Source: How mass immigration is worsening the housing crisis – The Spectator