In Which Zandar Wonders What Yglesias Is Smoking

...because it's clearly some primo product, man.

I’m a firm believer in the link between higher levels of immigration and higher average living standards for native-born people. But I recognize that this remains controversial. Something that certainly shouldn’t be controversial is the fairly obvious point that if we allowed more immigrants to come to the United States this would bolster home price values in a clearer and more sustainable way than any kind of crazy patchwork of tax breaks. Right now we have more houses than households, if we had more immigrants we’d have more households. We’d work off the excess inventory more quickly, and be closer to the day when home construction returns as a viable economic sector.

Umm, Matt, I dunnae have a Ph.D. or anything, but even I've got it pegged that the problem isn't "number of people in the country" but "number of households earning a wage that allows for the purchase of a home on mortgage".

The bar to home ownership is price and wage, not number of people in the market.  Unless this plan is somehow limited to "visas that allow people who are wealthy enough to buy houses outright to encourage them to move, live, and work here" into the country, I'm gonna go with that this is pushing on a string.

What we need is more jobs with better-paying wages, not more people inside the US.