Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake

As I see it, governments themselves are often rent seeking operations. By increasing taxes, they increase their share of the wealth of the nation, and depending on how that money is used, it could very well be considered rent seeking. Usually the term is used for business sectors interacting with government to get those tax dollars, but I don't think that's the only valid use.

The “special thing” that Houston has done is have virtually infinite land, a giant ocean port, and absolutely zero care or concern for the climate or the future.

If America has 2 Billion people in 100 years, building a little further away won't work, it doesn't scale. Cities need to build better cities that allow people to have the space they need and get to the jobs they have. Where they don't need to be commuting 2 hours each way.

If that was Georgia or Texas, the political landscape would change dramatically though I'd rather show up 10 years later than right now. Neither are appealing states.

And now the hip class wants to get rid of cars in their hip inner cities, because they don't need them. Again totally ignoring everyone that is both forced to live outside of the centre and work inside of it.

Actually, I think the minimum wage should be coupled to the typical rent around the working place. Good luck getting your new smartphone delivered then.

Huh? So the rent covers the infrastructure cost? Last time I checked, both renters and owners pay infrastructure directly. That includes waste water, garbage disposal, and pretty much everything else. None of this scales with the space I use, at most it scales with the square root of space due to larger distances.

We don't build new cities way far away in the middle of nowhere, because building new cities is expensive and there's no jobs in the middle of nowhere.

But even if there was such a support for honeowners, a property tax would be nothing else but theft. Charge the real cost of you want but then leave the people in peace.

This does not appear true in the real world. Low density housing requires more mileage of infrastructure, yes, but it's drastically cheaper miles. (You can wire 200 low density suburban houses with electricity across a dozen square miles, for less than the cost to wire up a single building in Manhattan)

Density makes infrastructure exponentially more expensive, because the largest costs of infrastructure is in labour and complexity, not the literal length of wire or piping or whatever.

> Because what’s valuable is not the house but the infrastructure around it. Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes.

This seems to contradict your own point. If low density housing needed more infrastructure, and houses were valued by the amount of infrastructure they needed, then low density housing would be the most valuable housing.

But it's not. In the real world, low density houses are the cheapest housing, and have the cheapest infrastructure costs. High density housing has the highest construction cost, highest land cost, highest infrastructure costs (despite less per-mile infrastructure use), and the highest transportation costs per person (when including total personal+government spending)

The value that is attributable to the community is the value of the land before building. Obviously that's far higher in the middle of NYC or SF or something. So I'm not sure what you are saying about low density housing.

There is/was a political movement to finance everything with a tax on the unimproved value of land. The advantage is that with almost everything you can tax, you get less of it, which is usually bad, and besides leads to avoidance and lower revenue. But unimproved land cannot be "discouraged" by taxes, and owners cannot pass the taxes on - their incentive is then to not leave it vacant, which is a very good thing in a dense city.

We're good out here in the rest of the country; in fact, if people could tolerate wotking remotely better, there are places where four-bedroom houses are selling for $80k.

The cost of building a “non-luxury” building is almost identical. In either case, you need investors to put up the money to pay for construction and maintenance of the building until enough units have sold/rent to be self sustaining. So even if you build a slightly less cosmetically appealing building, you still need investor capital / “the rich” to do so.

In urban areas, where the housing crisis is, a disproportionate share. Imagine a topographic map where housing prices are the relief. Thirty years ago, say the highest point in a given city was at $1M. Over time, as the top end income increases, that peak will steadily rise, pulling up all the prices around it. The problem is that to earn income (to be able to afford rising housing costs), people need to be close to the city center. So people with lower incomes "buy up" out of necessity, driving up the percentage of their income they spend on housing, because their income didn't rise as rapidly as the income of the next topographical "ring" in.

Basically, there is a mismatch: there's a growing disparity in wealth between classes, but the need for proximity to cities in order to make money has remained largely constant for lower incomes, particularly for service workers who cannot adapt to work remotely, like middle class tech workers can.

But then you lose some agency like being able to modify the rented home.

Since the mortgage-payer owns the house, has made improvements on the house, has an emotional investment in the house, there are strong biases such as sunk cost that make the buyer much more reluctant to get out from under it.

Knowing you don't have to come up with hundreds or thousands of dollars every month in order to live is an amazing feeling. You can then set aside that same money every month and upgrade to a better house. Unfortunately, most people decide they can't wait and take out 30-year mortgages that wind up costing them almost twice the value of the house.

With proper maintenance, a house can last with continuous use for a hundred years. With average use, you would be hard-pressed to have a car for more than 15 years before the cost to maintain greatly outstrips the cost to replace.

A mortgage is financial leverage. You only have x dollars but you spend x * n dollars and repay x * n plus interest later. This works out for you if the value of the money you are spending now is more than the value (value is relative) of the money that you repay over the next 30 years. It does not go well of the opposite is true.

The mortgage can be good because it locks you into a fixed payment per month. Rents fluctuate, if rent goes up, you pay more money. Mortgage payment does not go up (other than taxes which can). The downside is if rent goes down, you don’t get to take advantage of it.

So, it’s two very different sorts of bet on the housing market. It’s like a long term bond vs a short term bond, somewhat.

Note well that houses do depreciate, but depending on the area, the land will not. The depreciation in your house takes the form of maintenance in some cases, or a lower sale value than a newly renovated home.

In a major metro, the majority of the value of a house is land value, not building value.

Cars depreciate extremely rapidly, it would be a problem if we had to rebuild houses every 15 years. (Although Japan’s housing market is actually kind of like that and is very interesting to read about, you should look into the issues there if you haven’t already).

Regardless, the industry is rife with bad actors exploiting an imbalance of information.

The advertising on vehicles is designed to make you feel bad for not owning the best. Get slammed with that enough and you won't even realize you just bought that $90k coupe that will cost $10k in maintenance/yr to keep running to show off how wealthy you are while you hunt for a mate. Then if you have kids you'll take a bath on it for the dealer to make a profit when they resell it.

second+ homes,

all rentals that cost more than 30% average area take home (with the top 10% of incomes removed). Scale said taxes with the cost of living in that area. Double the tax on short term stays in 'rentable units'. (E.g. airbnb).

Everyone deserves a place to call home that is safe, insulated from the elements, has plumbing, electricity, and internet at a fair price. I simply don't care if that makes housing speculation, land ownership, and utilities, unprofitable. Making a profit off of necessities is obscene. Eg everyone should have access to a basic internet package that costs around $10-30/mo for ~25mbps. Same for everything else. Everyone should get the minimum, and if they want more they need to find a way to earn more in a way that isn't extracting value from the vulnerable. Extract from the rich instead, or don't. You shouldn't starve to death under a bridge if you can't compete in a society that needs less unskilled labor every day.