There are more people in the United States than there used to be. When I was in grade school, I learned as a child that our population was just a bit over 250 million. Google's claiming that it is 335 million right now.
Wikipedia says in the early 2000s we were at about 1 million illegal immigrants, and about another 1 million legal. I am unable to find reliable numbers for more recent years, but can it actually have gone down?
The nation could be building a million new housing units each year, and the pressure on supply wouldn't lessen. Maybe the problem isn't zoning or nimbyism or speculative investment.
We get urban sprawl and people building towns and homes in wildly inappropriate areas, such as forests. Which is why you see people's house going up in flames due to wildfire.
Meanwhile, human habitation continues to be a very small portion of land usage. We like living in metropolitan areas for a reason.
Anyway, we get a lot of benefit from immigration. I don't suggest we stop, but rather that we should adjust to demand. Nimbyism and zoning is still a problem especially with urban sprawl.
> Anyway, we get a lot of benefit from immigration.
Sure. But that doesn't mean that there's no tradeoff. Be aware of it.
We can't really talk about tradeoff of immigration if we have grossly inefficient land usage patterns and the ability to construct enough home if we so choose.
As of 2018 there were about 11M people residing illegally in the USA. That number has probably risen significantly in the past few years. Regardless of one's opinion on immigration policy it's clear that this increases demand for housing.
https://www.dhs.gov/ohss/topics/immigration/population-estim...
In my area, illegals tend to occupy low rent housing in rural areas, and there really aren't any shortages in that market. Mobile homes and places to put them are are readily available and reasonably affordable.
Illegals make such massive contributions to the construction industry that their impact on the supply curve should more than offset their impact on demand