Immigration wasn’t supplementing U.S. population growth. It WAS U.S. population growth. And we just cut it in half. The Census Bureau says the U.S. grew by 0.5% last year. Half the prior year. International migration dropped from 2.7 million to 1.3 million. The birth rate hit a record low in 2024. Deaths are steady. Strip it down: America’s organic growth has been below replacement for years. Immigration was the entire engine. Not a tailwind. The engine. So what happens to apartment demand when you turn it off? The industry answer is “supply is cresting, recovery is near.” That’s half the equation. Supply cresting only matters if demand holds. It’s not holding. Miami rents fell roughly 6% over 2025. Phoenix is 10% below trend. Austin stalled. And those numbers predate the worst of the demand hit. The Census data ends July 1st. H-1B slowdowns, visa backlogs, people abroad who just decided not to come… the actual demand destruction is probably worse than anything we can measure right now. Then there’s what nobody in the industry is modeling well. Household formation drives apartment demand more than raw headcount. A family of four that leaves removes one household. A 25-year-old who finally signs their own lease creates one without any population growth at all. The models tracking bodies instead of households are going to miss in both directions. Immigrants also build apartments. Restricting immigration tightens construction labor, raises costs, and slows future supply. Which creates a strange feedback loop where less housing gets built while fewer people show up to rent it. And insurance. In parts of South Florida and Texas, operating costs have climbed so fast that new deals struggle to pencil regardless of demand. That’s a separate problem layered on top of the demand problem. The developers who modeled 2% annual growth? They got 0.5%. I could be wrong. Maybe this reverses in a year or so. I’ve been humbled enough to know nobody has a clue what’s coming. But the math is asking a question worth sitting with: What if the multifamily recovery everyone’s forecasting requires a demand engine that no longer exists? https://lnkd.in/eRSYfKqq