Blaming immigrants for California’s housing crisis is not only factually wrong — it’s dangerously misleading. And yet, this tired narrative refuses to die.
President Donald Trump predictably trots it out in social media posts and elsewhere.
More troubling, though, is that a recent J.P. Morgan report flirted with the same faulty logic, suggesting that undocumented immigrants may be “ramping up housing demand” and contributing to the shortage.
Let’s be clear: our housing shortage isn’t the result of too many people seeking homes — it’s the result of decades of restrictive policies that block the homes people need from being built. Immigrants didn’t create that problem. Local and state governments did.
If demand alone caused housing shortages, then every American citizen — all 300+ million of us — would be equally to blame. But that’s not how housing markets work.
Demand doesn’t automatically result in scarcity. In nearly every other industry, increased demand leads to increased production. The difference with housing is that developers are prevented — by design — from meeting that demand due to exclusionary zoning, bureaucratic red tape, and legal loopholes that empower NIMBY lawsuits.
Historically, it wasn’t always this way. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigration fueled a massive urban boom. Between 1870 and 1900, the U.S. population doubled, largely due to immigration. Yet housing kept pace. Why? Because cities like New York allowed the private market to build. Regulations were minimal. Landowners had the freedom to construct what was needed — and they did, often in the form of dense, affordable tenement housing.
Of course, those tenements had real problems, but they were affordable, and they were homes. The backlash against them — fueled by xenophobia and moral panic — gave birth to the zoning laws that dominate our cities today. These laws didn’t just regulate health and safety. They were explicitly anti-density and, by extension, anti-immigrant. They curtailed the ability to build affordable multi-family homes in favor of single-family zoning, which became a tool to segregate cities by race, class, and — implicitly — nationality.
Those same land-use policies are alive and well today, and they are the root cause of our housing shortage. In California, a developer might wait five to ten years just to get a permit approved — if they can get one at all. Projects that check every environmental and affordability box still get stalled, delayed, or killed outright by CEQA abuse, endless appeals, or local opposition from residents who simply don’t want newcomers — immigrant or otherwise — living next door.
This is why scapegoating immigrants is not just wrong, it’s dangerous. It diverts attention from the real culprits: the outdated zoning codes, the endless permitting delays, and the entrenched political interests that benefit from the status quo. It also ignores the fact that immigrants are overwhelmingly renters — they don’t bid up home prices, they struggle to keep up with them. And many are stuck in overcrowded housing precisely because we haven’t built enough of it.
Ironically, if we want to protect vulnerable tenants — including many immigrants — we need more housing, not less. That means reforming zoning, streamlining approvals, and holding local governments accountable for meeting their housing obligations.
And if we’re going to talk about “ramping up demand,” let’s remember who’s actually hoarding housing. In cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, tens of thousands of units sit vacant. Wealthy investors treat homes like commodities, parking money in real estate and leaving properties empty. That’s a far more urgent threat to housing affordability than a family crossing the border in search of safety and stability.
In fact, the immigrant story is at the heart of California’s identity. Immigrants build our homes, care for our elderly, pick our crops, and staff our hospitals. Many came here seeking a better life — and if we were honest about the housing crisis, we’d acknowledge that the real barriers to a better life are the ones we’ve built into our own laws.
No, deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants wouldn’t solve the housing crisis. It would only deepen the moral and economic wounds of a nation already struggling with inequality. But allowing more homes to be built — and ensuring they’re affordable, accessible, and equitably located — just might.
The longer we blame immigrants for the consequences of our own policy failures, the longer we delay real solutions. And the more we miss the opportunity to live up to the values we claim to stand for.
David says: “Yet housing kept pace. Why?”
Because there were a lot fewer people, a lot more room to expand, and yes – a lot less fewer regulations. You’re referring to a time when the country was younger, smaller, and purposefully pursued population growth. Both the country and individual families are no longer pursuing that to the same degree.
We’ve also since learned what happens when you allow development to continue that way.
David says: “It diverts attention from the real culprits: the outdated zoning codes, the endless permitting delays, and the entrenched political interests that benefit from the status quo.”
The entrenched business interests are the YIMBY shills whose financial backers are the same ones who CREATED demand for housing (in places like Silicon Valley). No one “asked” them to do so.
The YIMBYs and their political cronies want those same demand-creators to continue to expand beyond what those communities can reasonably handle.
Regarding both undocumented and documented immigrants, they absolutely contribute to demand – at both ends of the respective housing market. Regarding the latter (documented) immigrants, you can (again) look at what Silicon Valley is pursuing regarding H-1 visa workers.
Also, when there is a limited supply of anything, an “incremental” (small increase) in demand can have a disproportionate impact on availability and prices. That’s what can happen in regard to immigrants or any other sudden incremental increase in demand.