Home ownership used to be one of the few accessible investments that directly benefit less well off people. Rather than throw rent money in a black hole they build equity. How is that a sham?
Keeping housing affordable means that it should grow with inflation, approximately.
A good investment should outpace inflation.
In California, people used zoning regulations to create a shortage and predictably house prices rose. Some people got richer. Other people got evicted.
Ideally, we'd create a slight housing surplus to reduce prices. As an added benefit, this would reduce rent-seeking opportunities and create a buffer of empty housing stock that would make moving and searching for a new place to live less of a hassle increasing people's mobility.
Would also note that housing can be affordable nationally, and unaffordable in some markets given the local nature of housing.
True, but if we don't densify (the natural result of that thinking), we'll condemn ourselves to waste inefficiency low growth and environmental destruction.
> I interpreted the parent post to be more as “sound financial strategy to saving” rather than “good investment” (buying for levered appreciation).
This is still a bit fraught, especially as housing has historically reason too fast. Remember there are net 0 dollars (basically), and saving is a mostly monetary phenomenon. Arguably it's because terrible cost disease in healthcare, education, housing, etc. that people want to save so much in the first place!
This idea that investing means squatting valuable assets needs to die.
Save on rent, farm, rent to others, make a shop... preventing others who would put the land to better use is doing more harm than good.
There are increasing returns to density, but they don't show up quick enough to defeat NIMBYism on the margins. The margins, of course, are where NIMBYism thrives. No one likes moving!
In the real world where shelter is durable, making it an investment creates a group of people who cannot afford shelter.
Homeownership-as-investment is a mechanism to increase one's wealth at the expense of the less fortunate. It is ethically bankrupt.
It is also a disgrace that even though technological progress makes more and more things people need affordable, we use political means like zoning regulations to artificially drive up home prices in order to turn them into a good investment and thus unaffordable for some.