Experts: Nationwide Rent Decline as Border Enforcement Reduces Migration

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt touted the nationwide decline in rents amid President Trump’s crackdown on illegal migration and before the November midterm elections.

“Apartment rents just dropped to the lowest level in 4 years,” Leavitt posted on her X account.

“The national median rent in January was $1,353, a drop of 1.4 percent compared with one year ago,” CNBC.com reported January 29. It is reportedly “the lowest January rent since 2022 [and] rents are now 6.2 percent lower than their last peak in the summer of 2022.”

The White House released a statement celebrating the drop in rents nationwide and crediting Trump’s “comprehensive approach to housing — increasing supply, reducing bureaucratic barriers, and empowering builders to meet demand” [emphasis original], citing positive reports from multiple states including California, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, and Idaho.

The decline in rents is a boon for young American citizens because it helps them leave their parents’ houses, socialize with their peers, and save for future house purchases before starting their own families. That is a long-term gain for the GOP which benefits when Americans form their own families.

Roughly 50 percent of all renters are under the age of 40.

Leavitt’s good-news post was echoed on the White House’s RapidResponse47 site:

“Recent housing data shows sellers now outnumber buyers by more than 500,000 nationwide… easing rent growth in markets where supply is no longer scarce,” TurboTenant.com reported on January 26.

For years, establishment media sites have pretended that President Joe Biden’s mass welcome for roughly 14 million migrants did not push up rents for young Americans. Instead, establishment journalists have blamed the disastrous price spikes on inflation, Covid, construction delays, and even government reluctance to set prices or build new apartments.

But Biden’s open-door policy was intended to extract human resources from poor countries in the hope of growing Wall Street, government agencies, and the overall economy with a new flood of consumers, renters, and workers.

Biden’s high-migration economic policy prompted many landlords to build new apartments for millions of migrants every year. Once those construction projects are finished in the next year or so, Trump’s low-migration policy will allow many more Americans to move into better apartments at lower rents than before.

Now reporters and their editors are being forced to recognize the obvious.

The Los Angeles Times reported on January 28 under the headline, “’Finally, a renter’s market’: L.A. rent prices drop to four-year low”:

Sandra Gomez braced for impact as she opened the lease renewal offer for her East L.A. apartment in September. She paid $2,000 for the last 12 months, but since the unit wasn’t covered by L.A.’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance, her landlord could jack up the price for the next lease.

The new price? $1,950. “I thought it was a mistake,” Gomez said. “Since when does rent get cheaper in L.A.?”

“I’ve had friends leave L.A. because they lost jobs and couldn’t keep up with rent,” Gomez, age 29, told the newspaper. “If prices drop even a little, it goes a long way toward my quality of life.”

“Not only did a lot of my tenants disappear, but slow paying became more of a norm, because people are living month to month trying to figure out if they’re going to be here or not,” Ariel Lopez, a Florida landlord, told a real estate study that was publicized January 28 by BisNow.com.

In Florida, where about 22 percent of the population is foreign-born, 67 percent of landlords polled reported a negative impact from immigration policy enforcement, according to the report. In Texas, 21 percent of owners and developers reported a significant negative impact, while another 26 percent said they felt a somewhat negative impact.

Lopez owns 300 apartments in Miami-Dade County that today are operating at a 30 percent vacancy rate, he said. Typically, that rate is closer to 2 percent. He places the blame squarely on the federal government’s immigration policies.

“Immigration is going to be very low for the foreseeable future… that removes a big segment of rental demand,” study director Eric Finnigan told BisNow.com.

Trump, however, is facing a difficult political dilemma as he gradually deflates the economic bubble created by the federal welcome for both legal and illegal migration since 1990.

The decline in migrants pushes down rents — and also pushes down the price of housing. That is good for young people and for new families — but bad for the older Americans who feel richer because of inflated housing prices, and who vote at higher rates.

This political dilemma prompted Trump to recently say he does not want to push down housing values — even though his migration policies are set to make housing more affordable for young people.

During his 2024 election campaign, Trump promised to make housing more affordable by cutting interest rates.

“We will make housing much more affordable… [and] we will get [mortgage rates] back down to 3 percent… [so] young people will be able to buy a home again and be part of the American dream,” he said, adding:

Millions of people will take part… [in] reviving the American Dream. It’s about the American Dream. It’s all about the American Dream. We don’t talk [about the] American Dream with these [Democratic] people in office. They don’t want to talk about the American dream because they are the exact opposite.

While Trump is zig-zagging on housing, he is also pushing a new economic strategy that would grow Americans’ prosperity with a new generation of productivity-boosting technology and innovation.