Upvote!
Private property ownership and intergenerational wealth transfer is the foundation of middle class, and bigger middle class leads to better education for the masses, and a more democratic society!
Private property ownership and intergenerational wealth transfer is the foundation of middle class, and bigger middle class leads to better education for the masses, and a more democratic society!
Add up all the money you have spent on rent and mortgage payments and pretend it just never happened. It's life changing to have that.
I see it as problematic. Keeps the ground unlevel.
An interesting solution is to decouple the price of the house from the price of the land it stands on, and then the government could rent the land and use that income instead of other taxes. Better description of this idea is here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
The difference as you go down the wealth classes hits a point of, being able to afford a home at all or never being able to purchase a home.
Historically, housing has actually been a poor investment relative to investing in the stock market. Most people simply didn't know how or whether to invest, but nowadays investment vehicles like index funds and target date funds make that relatively straightforward.
We should be discouraging housing as investment so affordable housing can be a thing that exists and the housing market can respond to demand by building out the supply at levels people can afford while also encouraging people to sock away at least 5-15% of every paycheck into passively managed investment vehicles that have way higher long term returns than housing ever did.
The current situation is that we subsidize the middle and upper classes in terms of housing at the expense of the poor and those just starting out by artificially and unnecessarily pushing up the price of housing and constraining supply.
Even if you wanted to think of housing as an investment, it should be compared not to the stock market but to the lifelong cost of renting, since it's one or the other (unless you plan to be homeless).