I’ve been thinking about what hipmatt said earlier:
“…while most of the population increases are from migration of relatively poor and creditless illegal immigrants. Good luck selling houses at these prices to them…”
There is a phenomenon I see here, involving (presumably) legal immigrants, where a large family (or several) buy into a house together and all chip in to make the payments. Thus you get 10 or more people crammed into a “single family” house and loads of cars parked in the street in front of and around it. I think it’s in fact aggravated by the “McMansionisation” of housing. The failure to build smaller, affordable houses doesn’t necessarily block these people from buying… it just gives them incentive to pile multiple people into a big house instead of one family into a smaller one. Escondido is wrestling with this problem now and I see it to some extent in Mira Mesa too. So just because they are poor immigrants doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t buy houses… just as likely, IMO, that they will pile into houses, resulting in overcrowded on-street parking.
On a related topic, about “the illegals”… I’ve seen an anecdotal comment from the U.S. Southeast (someone in building trades), and a recent article in the U-T about a big decrease in the San Ysidro cross-border traffic. Whether they are illegals, green-card legals, or what, it may be that the drop in jobs in the U.S. due to our recession is initially being soaked up by the immigrant/temporary workers. In other words, they are being laid off first, and are going/staying home (to Mexico/Central America). I have no idea in what numbers but it’s something to watch out for.
One last thing. When discussing immigration, we need to draw a bright hard line between “illegal” and “legal” immigrants. I see people on both sides of the debate blur this line constantly and it is a never-ending source of aggravation to me. Just because someone is brown and poor doesn’t necessarily mean they are illegal (or because someone is a white professional doesn’t mean they are legal– just look at our Governator). Go down to Golden Hall on a new-citizen-induction ceremony day. 1,000 people, mostly brown, come walking out those doors– and they are all not only “legal”, they are newly-minted American citizens.
