Hitting the ocean with a baseball bat: illegal immigration and housing
A year ago, in my four-part post De Soto’s Dryer (see also Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), I remarked on the intersection between affordable housing and immigration both legal and illegal, as well as on the complexities of immigrant and housing enforcement:
I venture into this subject with great trepidation — it’s absolutely not my area and is furiously generating an enormous bonfire of punditry elsewhere — but it’s frequently on my mind, because where do enormous numbers of illegal immigrants live?
Immigrant family,
They live in slums or in affordable or public housing.
Yet markets and people move even if government does not, and with our multiple levels of government and the curious current policy innovation inversion, it should be little surprise that at least one local government has decided to tackle the immigration problem directly — and decisively. As reported in the
FARMERS BRANCH, Texas — Voters in this
Just northwest of
The balloting Saturday marked the first public vote on a local government measure to crack down on illegal immigration. The ban passed with 68% of the vote in unofficial returns.
“It says especially to Congress that we’re tired of the out-of-control illegal immigration problem. That if Congress doesn’t do something about it, cities will,” said Tim O’Hare, a City Council member who was the lead proponent of the ordinance.
Councilor O’Hare is clear that his motivations are economic:
“The reason I got on the City Council was because I saw our property values declining or increasing at a level that was below the rate of inflation,” Mr. O’Hare said.
Declining property values hit local budgets, and therefore affect the quality of schools.
“When that happens, people move out of our neighborhoods, and what I would call less desirable people move into the neighborhoods, people who don’t value education, people who don’t value taking care of their properties.”
Here I disagree with Mr. O’Hare: everywhere I have been, including the grimmest of slums, people who actually have property (that they have paid for) take care of it.
He also said local schools have dropped in recent years in state rankings, and retail operations cater to low-income and Spanish-speaking customers, leaving “no place for people with a good income to shop.”
“Illegal immigrants are a large cause of it,” he said.
Mr. O’Hare confuses cause and effect. If shops have opened catering to low-income and Spanish-speaking customers, that’s not because they have driven out the ‘better class’ of shops, but rather because there is new demand for a more diverse retail marketplace.
To address Mr. O’Hare’s concerns, the voters used a time-honored political approach to the thorny problem of enforcement — make enforcement someone else’s problem, in this case the landlord’s:
I’m your prospective landlord and I’m here to check up on you
The new law requires apartment managers to verify that renters are US citizens or legal immigrants before leasing to them, with some exceptions. Property managers or owners who violate the rule face a misdemeanor charge punishable by a fine of up to $500.
Presumably, the fine is $500 per incident, so owners will now be facing a potentially large liability.
With Saturday’s approval of the ban, opponents plan to fight it in court, and will seek a restraining order to stop the city from enforcing it.
The city was already facing four lawsuits brought by civil rights groups, residents, property owners and businesses who contend that the ordinance discriminates and that it places landlords in the precarious position of acting as federal immigration officers. Their attorneys say the ordinance attempts to regulate immigration, a duty that is exclusively the federal government’s.
The landlords are hoping … but I think they’ll lose
Though I’m neither an immigration nor Constitutional lawyer [You’re no lawyer at all! — Ed.], I question whether these lawsuits have any merit. Renter legality verification has nothing to with restricting immigration, it merely imposes a duty for those who choose to do a particular kind of business (offering their property for rent) in this lovely community.
O’Hare contends that the city’s economy and quality of life will improve if illegal immigrants are kept out.
That’s the interesting contention. Will it improve? Assume the law goes into effect tomorrow. What are the consequences?
People move out … or owners evict. Unless
‘Those people’ relocate to adjacent towns. Expulsion from Farmers Branch won’t send ‘those people’ back to
If only we could send them to the intercontinental pink dots
The new residents will be workers, but not necessarily in their new home town, and spending money, and possibly sending their children to school.
That’s a lot of little kids, probably many of them living in apartments
The rental market in
A good rule of thumb is 1½ people per bedroom
And more rooms per apartment than in
At 1 kitchen, 1 bath, 1 living room, plenty of rooms to be converted into kids’ rooms
We can infer a high proportion of families with young children in these properties. Perhaps that is what the community not-so-subtly has in mind? Farmer’s Branch is busily promoting other initiatives to improve its community, like a home buyers’ incentive program, a major remodeling program, and an exterior makeover program, all of them geared conspicuously to home ownership.
Buyers welcome, braceros unwelcome
Still here, 43 years later
A burgeoning market in false ID. With so much emphasis placed on immigration status, a market will rapidly emerge for plausible false-ID. Further, many landlords, particularly those with inferior properties, will have a strong self-interest in accepting these false ID’s. Unless the law creates additional penalties for accepting a bad ID — here we enter the very murky waters of scienter, should the landlord be enough of a forgery expert to know the ID is fake? — the incentives are all wrong for strong enforcement.
A flurry of ‘condo conversions.’ Unless the ordinance imposes the same duties on home buyers as it does on renters, we could see a spate of conversions of properties, especially smaller ones, into occupant ownership schemes, where a group of tenants pool their resources, perhaps with a tenant-friendly nominee owner, and buy the newly converted property. (The rental
The rental market goes underground. Landlords who suddenly find their property plummeting in value (through a vacuum-like moveout phenomenon) may ‘take their property off the market,’ and rent in cash without any documentation. This is particularly likely in smaller properties, two- and three-family apartments as opposed to professional complexes, where
Affordable apartments, no mod cons?
As with the fake-ID problem, the interests of the small landlord and the illegal renter are strongly aligned — both benefit from a cash transaction with no records.
Unfortunately for the tenants, extra-judicial transactions have no benefit of law, so when the power is asymmetric, the weaker party usually suffers.
Spontaneous slum-like communities will emerge. Some will emerge in pristine
Illegal immigrants will live in worse housing. That’s the clearest outcome of all this; however they cope, whatever the merits of their case, illegal immigrants will be living in worse housing, perhaps paying more for it, and very vulnerable to exploitation in the slums inside.
If this story has a moral, it’s simply this: in complex ecosystems like housing markets, direct intervention has all sorts of undesirable secondary consequences, particularly when your scope of intervention is geographically small. Councilor O’Hare’s actions are like King Canute, trying to hold back the ocean by hitting it with a baseball bat.
Take that, illegal immigrants!
The action is direct, it is powerful, it produces a loud noise and a vast splash — and the ocean keeps rising.
Yet, if
Around the country, more than 90 local governments have proposed, passed, or rejected laws prohibiting landlords from leasing to illegal immigrants, penalizing businesses that employ them or training police to enforce immigration laws. Many of the measures have not passed constitutional muster. In
If one baseball bat does not stop the sea, perhaps there will be dozens, scores, hundreds of such baseball bats. The noise they make will be loud, it may be satisfying to those swinging, but it will make no difference, for the water is mutable, and relentless.
Look, I made this illegal, don’t you know?
Faced with a rising tide, there are only five options (and remarkably, the metaphor works in all cases):
1. Drain it. Stanch the flow by preventing the water from building up pressure.
2. Dam it. Build a hermetically sealed barrier and keep the water out.
3. Divert it. Channel it to irrigate the fields or flow into natural rivers.
4. Swim in it. Learn to cope with an ever-rising tide.
5. Drown. Succumb.
It’s still illegal!
When it comes to illegal immigration, I don’t know what
For the sake of
