Are Foreigners and Outsiders Stealing Our Housing?

Are foreigners and other outsiders stealing our housing? That seems to be yet another growing area of agreement between the populist right and the populist left. JD Vance has been arguing for some time that illegal immigration, simply by increasing the population, drives up housing costs: "A lot of young people are saying, housing is way too expensive. Why is that? Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens," Vance told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on November 13, 2025. "And at the same time we weren’t building enough new houses to begin with even for the population that we had." He's still touting as well the notion that the effective supply of housing will be increased by banning institutional investors from buying homes — a cause championed by Elizabeth Warren.

Now, we have Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani pushing a "pied-à-terre tax" on luxury apartments owned by foreigners and other nonresidents of New York City who don't live in those apartments full-time. "Most of the time, these units are sitting empty, since . . . they don't actually live here," Mamdani complains. "This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers."

Both of these lines of reasoning go in the same direction: thinking that the problem with housing is too much demand. Markets, however, are very good at responding to demand — unless they are unreasonably restricted from providing supply. (To be fair, Vance has also talked about the supply problem, and even Mamdani, as little as he understands markets, has been pushing for more housing construction, even with funds the city is supposed to be investing for its pensioners.) Imposing new tax costs on second-home housing, and trying to stifle demand by excluding institutional buyers from the market, is not the way to incentivize more housing construction.

Moreover, it's kind of silly to blame a shortage of working-class housing on the fact that some luxury apartments aren't occupied; it's not as if your local barista is going to rent a 20,000-square-foot penthouse owned by an oil sheikh. At its worst, this type of zero-sum thinking is anti-people: it's a stance that is easy enough for pro-abortion, climate-panic leftists to embrace but that is also embedded in Vance's economic thinking. America has managed to have plenty of affordable housing in past eras when we had massive population growth, both from high domestic birth rates and from immigration. The Gilded Age had plenty of rich people who owned multiple properties. The answer to housing shortages isn't to complain about the people who own or rent homes. It's to build.