There are certain ideas I grew up believing were safe to discuss in polite company.
Gravity. Two plus two equals four. If you invite twenty people to dinner, you probably need more chairs.
Apparently we have now reached the point where housing demand requires a trigger warning.
Rocky Mountain Voice recently asked whether illegal immigration contributed to higher housing prices. The answer in the piece was cautious: yes, probably, but it is only one factor in a much larger housing problem. The author notes that researchers disagree about the size of the effect, while generally recognizing that adding population adds housing demand.
That seems less like a radical political theory and more like something you learn when somebody unexpectedly brings six extra cousins to Thanksgiving.
More people need more places to live.
That statement does not tell us what immigration policy should be. It does not tell us how to treat immigrants. It does not excuse cruelty, and it certainly does not mean immigration is the sole reason Colorado housing costs have gone completely bananas.
It means demand is real.
Colorado has spent years making housing harder and more expensive to build. Land-use restrictions matter. Permitting delays matter. Construction costs matter. Government fees matter. Infrastructure matters. Local resistance to new housing matters.
And yes, population growth matters too.
We should be capable of holding all those thoughts in our heads at the same time without somebody pulling a political fire alarm.
Here is the part that bothers me.
For years, our political and institutional class has been remarkably comfortable absorbing rapid population growth while treating housing supply, roads, schools, water, shelters, hospitals, and other public services as though capacity were merely an attitude problem.
Then prices rise, services strain, and families get squeezed.
Everybody gathers for another panel discussion.
What a mystery.
Compassion does not require us to suspend arithmetic.
We can treat newcomers humanely. We should.
We can also say that when more people arrive in a community, they need apartments, homes, transportation, classrooms, medical care, and infrastructure. Those things do not magically appear because a nonprofit put the word “equity” in a PowerPoint presentation.
They require money, land, planning, construction, time, and somebody willing to admit there are limits.
That is especially important in Colorado, where housing was already painfully expensive before the latest immigration surge. The people most vulnerable to added pressure are not hedge-fund managers shopping for their fourth ski house. They are renters, young families, working people, seniors, and folks already hanging onto affordability by their fingernails.
The common-sense position is not “immigrants caused the housing crisis.”
They didn’t.
The equally dishonest position is pretending millions of additional people can enter a housing market without affecting demand because acknowledging that fact might make somebody uncomfortable.
Colorado needs more housing. We need saner land-use policy, faster permitting, lower barriers to construction, honest infrastructure planning, and an immigration policy that recognizes communities have actual capacity.
That is not hatred.
That is adulthood.
A decent society can have compassion for people and contempt for bullshit at the same time.
In fact, these days, we may need a lot more of both.
Source: Rocky Mountain Voice
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