Housing Costs: When The Money Gets Dirty, Are The Dirty To Blame?

Cat sitting in a frying pan
This scene was created by affordablehousingaction.org and is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
Something's wrong here. Donald Trump says poor, undocumented immigrants can afford to outbid local citizens for housing, when they can barely afford food.

America, like many other countries around the world, is slowly waking up to a reality that many of its population can no longer afford housing. As a result, those citizens no longer rent or own shelter for themselves and family.

Who is to blame for this situation? For a number of years now, governments at all levels have preferred to blame unhoused citizens themselves, as if they prefer to live in an irresponsible condition. That theory allows the unhoused to indulge in drugs and anti-social behaviour of one kind or another, meanwhile failing to pull themselves up by supposedly convenient bootstraps.

Few civic actions or inactions based upon unhoused self-rescue have proven effective. The price and conditions associated with acquiring shelter dominate reality. The number of homeless continues to grow, along with ever-increasing costs of housing, which more and more citizens simply cannot afford.

What’s the reason for this ever-increasing cost of housing that continues to ensure that more and more average — definitely not drug-addled — individuals and families cannot buy themselves shelter?

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has a heart-felt answer to this question. It is undocumented migrants. They are arriving illegally in America, scooping up available housing and preventing upstanding American citizens from purchasing the shelter they so badly need.

Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw in this argument. Undocumented migrants are inevitably poverty-stricken. So much so that to hear Trump tell the story, these illegals are forced to eat neighbourhood pets in order to survive, presumably raw, as if the migrants lack the capability to cook them.

How on earth would such poverty-stricken people be able to afford to pay for/snatch entire houses for rent or sale away from upstanding but otherwise poverty-stricken official citizens?

A recent article in politico.com offers one plausible answer. World-wide ‘dirty money’ is shouldering its way into respectable financial systems around the world, used in order to acquire local housing for investment purposes, not as places to live. This dirty money is winning out over financially overmatched citizens, who are being systematically driven out of the housing market and into homelessness.

For a discussion of this proposed explanation for rising national housing costs, read more at politico.com: Undocumented Workers Aren’t Raising Home Prices. Undocumented Cash Is.

A further thought on this subject does deserve some consideration. Housing markets in some cities have been subject to financial invasion, not necessarily by ‘dirty’ money, but by ‘offshore’ money. For example, Canada’s west coast city of Vancouver has been a favoured investment milieu for wealthy Asians looking for a safe financial haven. ‘Dirty’ need not come into this picture. Alas, even sparkling clean money drives up local housing prices and annually puts Vancouver in the world’s top two or three of costly housing markets.

Can city, provincial, or national governments exert any control over this influx of investment money, whether ‘clean’ OR ‘dirty?’ The answer is ‘yes it can,’ but small adjustments are unlikely to make miraculously major changes towards housing at a price that the unhoused can afford. Try: British Columbia Tax Successfully Cools Vancouver’s $$$$$ Housing Market