Until a country decides to stop making policy to support this notion that a basic need should be an appreciating asset and not a depreciating one like food, transportation, etc, this completely unsurprising trend will continue. It is a strange world we live in where we collectively believe that a basic need should increase in price over time.
Even when there's plenty to go around for everyone, it seems we'd rather not let that happen.
[1] I have a strong feeling that economists have missed the memo from Popper regarding what is modern science. There seems to be quite a lot of unfalsifiable assumptions lying at the bottom of economics, starting from the utility maximizing agent.
I have an economics degree. I'm not claiming to be an economist here at all, but I'm mentioning it because it's relevant to what I'm about to say here: What I learned throughout my undergraduate education is that economics is a social science built upon the _presumption_ of scarcity.
Classical economics doesn't apply if you break that invariant. We need something else if we achieve post-scarcity, and I'm not sure that it'd be another existing mainstream economic school of thought.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with you - your point is valid. I'm agreeing on the "create artificial scarcity" response that you're observing. I suppose what I'm trying to say is, whatever other unfalsifiable assumptions you're pointing at in economics shouldn't matter because the broken scarcity invariant breaks the rest of it. Trying to use an economic argument in a post-scarcity scenario is, to me, applying the wrong tool for the job in order to preserve a specific interest. That's my opinion, anyway, and I'm sure someone else who has more experience or education in the field beyond my 4 year degree 20 years ago could tell me I'm wrong.
That and other elements of rational choice theory are not unfalsifiable. In fact, some of them were from the outset not merely falsifiable but known false but tentatively held as useful approximations over large populations. In fact, in the scientific part of economics (and other social sciences; rational choice theory has wide impacts), the debate has long been over whether the rational choice model is a still even useful reference point against which to mark variations, given the extensive degree to which it has proven false. (OTOH, a number of higher-level phenomenon predicted by they model have proven predictively useful even though the lower-level model is known false.)
Of course, some of economics (e.g., the Austrian school) is overtly driven by a normative ideological agenda rather than pursuing descriptive, empirical science.
>Of course, some of economics (e.g., the Austrian school) is overtly driven by a normative ideological agenda rather than pursuing descriptive, empirical science.
This is actually one reason the Austrian school criticises the neoclassical school. The neoclassical school is just as much founded on ideological assumptions as the Austrian school (main difference is cardinal vs ordinal utility), as it's impossible to have a "theory of value" without some underlying philosophical notion of value. However the neoclassical school hides this value system under so many layers of maths in an attempt to convince people it's a real, objective science like physics or chemistry.
There is a form of economics that makes testable predictions with a reasonably high degree of accuracy, and isn't based on any underlying ideology: it's called "quantitative finance".
Can you give an example what could you do to prove me that you do not maximize your utility? I mean, regardless how stupid thing you come up, I can always say "but that's what you chose to do, so that obviously was your preferred course of action and obviously you were then maximizing your utility"
I really hope there is discussion whether rational choice is useful, but the problem is that that discussion does not (yet) descend to the level of MBA economics and below. And that is unfortunately the level where politics are made.
There are other solutions that have been seriously considered or proposed. For example in copyright one idea is to allow things to be freely copied and have some rich entity pay creators. This was how it was done a long time ago, with the rich entity usually being a king or a ruler of a city-state or a wealthy lord.
Another idea is to pay creators via some tax on something that is roughly correlated with copying. An example would be a tax on blank tape.
A problem with these approaches is deciding who gets paid and how much. In the tax approach not many people seem to like the idea of the government deciding which artists should get funded. The usually way to avoid that is to have it based on how many copies are made. But then you need some way to get that data.
You could do it via some kind of polling. That was probably the only way back when copying was mostly physical, such as copying a record to a cassette tape. Nowadays when it is mostly digital you could do it by server side monitoring on download/streaming sites and/or device-side monitoring of playback--but then you are getting into areas that will worry many people for being an opening to more general surveillance.
For ordinary physical goods we don't have these problems--a free market (even the poor approximation of a free market that we have) works pretty good for determining what to produce. But that only works if the goods have certain properties, which copies of art do not have. (If anyone wants more information, look into excludable vs non-excludable goods and rival vs non-rival goods).
The approach of current copyright law is to legally give copies those properties so that the market can determine what art gets produced and how much the artist makes. This is a tradeoff, because it does mean that the consumer pays more for copies than the "correct" free market price (marginal cost of copying).
The other approaches mentioned above tend to make the tradeoff the other way--the consumer pays marginal cost of copying, but less art gets produced than consumers would like.
There's not really any way to avoid having either underproduction or underutilization when it comes to easily copyable art. Once you realize this things make a lot more sense.
One way to do so with IP/information/open source software, would be to give everyone access to just about all IP, but then when a surplus value is not known and needs to be accessed, you give people an option of what they value it. Get a statistically significant sampling group, then pick some percentage of the sampled group should get access, say 95%, and then query them using a Vickrey auction system what their true value is. The people who have the lowest 5% value don't get access to that item for some period. For everyone above 95%, they all pay that bottom 5% price for access to it, not their bid, like a Vickrey auction.
In this way only 5% of the sampled group, which may be 1% of the population lose access, and yet you still get to figure out the range of values throughout the population for that thing because Vickrey auction's incentivize that you bid your true value. Take some weighted average of the bid values and subsidize the IP owner with those funds.
This is what proponents of IP claim. Many even think it is so obvious that there is no need for evidence, but anyway, I'd be keen to see some evidence for the claim.
I can think of a handful of immaterial goods that are not under IP (e.g food recipes and financial innovations). What is common on those is that I am quite happy with the amount available of those immaterial goods (what comes to financial innovation, one might argue that there have been a bit too much of that at some point of our history)
One can infer a smaller supply of art, assuming standard economic assumptions. Some human activities seem to me not to be driven by these assumptions. Stories of artists who create what they seem to be driven to create, not what potential customers want at that moment.
Time is a scarce resource, both for creators and consumers. Some of us get more time than others, but we each get 24 hours per day; in that respect there is equality.
Under what conditions or assumptions might there be "enough" art created and copied?
It’s not a bit more scientific than your argument. I do believe it’s true. But that is precisely my point. Whatever theory underlies IP and it’s benefit to society is entirely based in speculation.
Important to keep in mind that it's not just a tradeoff because it increases marginal cost, it's a tradeoff because it outright restricts the creation of new content.
In creative industries, it means that creators are sometimes unable to build on or adapt creative work to apply to new situations or to expand on artistic ideas. Many market consequences extend from this restriction for better and for worse -- there's a reason why Nintendo games don't work on PCs or have certain accessibility features, there's a reason why backing up save data for many of their games is still a giant pain in the neck, and it's because it's illegal for other companies to create those features for Nintendo games.
IP law also has the consequence of drastically raising the barrier of entry to creating new IP, since assets and universes can't be reused or repurposed without contracts.
And of course, this also has the consequence that certain utility innovations can't happen -- E-Readers in particular have been hobbled for a long time, not just because of patent law but because existing platforms are allowed to make it illegal to transfer legally purchased books into different ecosystems. This reduces market competition in the space, artificially driving up the cost of not just the content itself, but also much of the hardware used to consume that content. There are a lot of things we could build in the E-Reader space around universal annotations, accessibility features like live-reading, etc. IP law restricts a lot of that stuff, you may not build a competing E-Reader that reads EBooks purchased on Amazon.
This obviously has consequences for the market itself; by embracing IP law, we have chosen to effectively kill off and completely eliminate competition in several areas of the free market, while making it illegal to build some meta-layers on top of platforms without enormous amounts of capital and negotiation power.
But it also obviously has cultural consequences since building on top of existing work and sharing cultural experiences (including stories) is something that is basically built into our DNA as human beings.
So we can debate whether there are advantages to IP law and whether they're wortwhile, but I do want to push back a little bit on the idea that marginal cost is the main consequence of Copyright. It's not, Copyright is a choice we've made to artificially eliminate certain parts of the market and to make certain projects and innovations practically impossible to build by anyone other than the biggest players in the market. It's not just about books getting more expensive, Copyright is a system with real tradeoffs, it increases the production of a specific kind of art at the tradeoff of drastically reducing the production of other kinds of art, and at the cost of shaping how art gets distributed and consumed and what things we can do with it, even privately.
It doesn't seem like that bad of an idea, if we take as given that a government service could actually provide as a good of a product as the modern streaming platforms do.
Understanding this fact has led me to a thousand and one horrible "that's a feature, not a bug" realizations.
If resources truly do not have scarcity, there is no need to manage them. The need to manage a resource comes about only when it is scarce.
In fact, I can't think of any resources so abundant that they need no management. Even the oceans and the sky must be managed now, eh?
In the stock market, there is an evergrowing pool of securities getting sequestered away into pension schemes and RRSPs. You can change what security you are in, but people/funds seldom get out of the market. When you cash our of your retirement (before actual retirement), there are huge tax disincentives to do so. For housing, people generally have a progression as they move to larger houses (as they have more kids, or kids get older). If all houses continue to get expensive, you just always stay in the housing market (well, until you go to a retirement home or expire).
Both seem to remind me of the classic definition of a ponzi scheme, except housing is a basic necessity. We are basically saying there is an evergrowing mountain of wealth - you just can't spend it till you retire.
Growth is natural, given that there are more people born, more money is printed and the economy expands to add jobs to meet those needs.
So yes, if tomorrow, no one else was born, a lot of systems would fall apart. Because growth would stall and liquidity would soon disappear as the last sellers find the last buyers.
There are disincentives around divesting your retirement funds because at that age you probably won’t have the physical capacity to work anymore. So encouraging investment into a vehicle that has shown generational abilities to generate growth and returns and beat deflationary effects seems only logical. The government creates this behavior by agreeing not to tax some income if you invest in your retirement.
However, this isn’t scarcity, stock markets are probably one of the most liquid assets on the planet besides literal cash.
If an economy is inherently inflationary then asset prices will literally always have to increase. In my mind this is less about house prices rising and more about the centralization of well paying jobs within specific economic hubs. There are millions of homes and hundreds of thousands of acres of lands that are practically worthless, but aren’t actually viable candidates because until recently you had to commute and the land lacked investment into the necessary infrastructure to support those jobs.
I’ve seen some arguments that no one wants live in small towns. And I don’t necessarily disagree, because the centralization of talent, competition and investment is often what makes large cities attractive. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize the fundamental aspect that all large cities were once small towns.
If companies or individuals aren’t willing to take a risk and move to underdeveloped areas, then it seems only logical that scarcity will be created in centralized pockets and prices will be driven up doesn’t it?
Lastly, this idea that an object that for most people will be the most expensive purchase they ever make should be a static or deflationary asset is not something I understand. Home ownership isn’t cheap between maintenance and property taxes. Ideally those costs should be recouped somehow.
I prefer small town life, and I'm sure many others do too. One upside of the pandemic is that with more companies getting comfortable with remote work, centralization of talent is not quite as big a deal as before.
Yes and no. Does that mean houses have to get bigger? Cars more "luxurious" and complicated (read: expensive)? Or higher education - for the same degree - also disproportionately more expensive?
Or are all these "givens" simply bad assumptions that have been nomalized?
The stock market? "Appears to show" - FIFY. I'm reminded of the periodic 401(k) presentations at our company before I retired; the pitchperson would always put up the same, tired, old, vague graph of the stock market rising at a 45-degree angle from the Great Depression to the present time. But that's not really true, is it? Indexes like the DJIA are mathematical models that get reformulated periodically and the suite of companies included in an index also changes over time. I believe this is called cherry-picking the data.
Actual investors in individual stocks or mutual funds have no guarantee of generational growth, of course. In NYT's Justin Fox's book about the stock market, IIRC, he said that equity mutual funds had an annual average growth rate a little above 2% between 1984 and the early 2000s, while the S&P 500's annual growth rate averaged about 12%. (Dates and growth rates are approximate as I don't have the book at hand). 401(k)ers didn't exactly make out like bandits.
That's scary.
> Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
When my kids want Robux I try to explain that they are paying real money to see their screen light up in a certain way and nothing more.
All software and media purchases can boil reductively down to "paying money to see a screen light up in a certain way".
If you have Blackrock and Vanguard buying up 20% of homes in the US at above market rates, that would do it.
What “you” did is oppose higher-density construction, which means the homes that exist today are the homes everyone in the future has to compete for, if they want to live near population centers. NIMBYism makes the profit that attracts the sharks.
Which is essentially what Bitcoin does. There is a natural abundance of numbers but crytocurrency protocols make some more scarce/valuable than others.
1. A company can create more shares but the number of shares has nothing to do with the value of your holdings. The shares are not scarce, but the supply is controlled by the company in response to its need raise capital. It's not arbitrary.
2. Fiat money, by definition, has value by decree. It serves to provide liquidity to loans and other obligations within the economy. The amount of money relative to demand for payments, loans etc. in the economy determines how much a $ is worth. It's not scarce or printed willy-nilly, but rather to keep the economy going and maintain relatively stable prices. Again not arbitrary and therefore not artificially scarce.
Bitcoin is scarce because the number in existence is arbitrary/predetermined and doesn't change in response to demand, hence its extreme volatility.
Which isn't new (neither is mistaking a clear case of natural scarcity in an unfamiliar structure for natural abundance; the metaverse is limited by all the traditional dimensions of computing/information capacity—energy, processing capacity, storage, etc.—and it won't take long, if it actually exists in a usable form, before exploiting the superficial abundance results into usage running headlong into the real natural scarcity; artificial scarcity will be superfluous.)
I don't think anyone is intentionally putting their finger on the scale when it comes to real-estate prices.
Maybe, and this is not from any data I can pull up, it is those with deep pockets buying additional properties as investments/rentals. And now we have huge corporations flipping, building rental homes on a massive scale.... The only solution I can see is to tax the living hell out of 3rd, 4th properties (etc.).
Sure it is, because the jobs are everywhere internet is.
Semi-rural and rural property values should roughly follow fiber and Starlink rollouts.
How many jobs in the U.S. can be done from the internet?
We should recognize from time to time that not everyone is an "information worker" like us and all our co-workers. In fact, we are few and are among an elite.
How does an ICU nurse take care of a patient over the Internet? How does a cashier ring through groceries of a shopper over the Internet?
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-a...
There's plenty of we who want to see change. But not enough of us. There are still too many who buy into the web of the narrative spun by The They.
He would look at our weak but non-zero safety nets and say, "You can do so much better," and note that if they didn't exist then Capitalism would have ended a long time ago.
So I don't know what he'd predict from here. We're in a semi stable state, looking at a potentially more stable one but very afraid of it and even more afraid of upsetting the status quo. But if things got worse -- and they keep threatening to -- that would turn the semi stable state real unstable real quick.
In a post-scarcity world capitalism would make no sense, because there would be no need for an economy, since everything would be infinitely abundant.
I've mentioned this before but it's worth saying again: 1 square foot of housing is approximately the same price - adjusted for inflation - as it was in the 1970s, on average. [1] There's a few caveats however.
(1) New houses are 2x bigger on average than they were back then, and the average American family is smaller [1].
(2) City councils, and by extension zoning rules, in major metros preclude construction meaning that supply cannot meet demand. This benefits existing landowners to the detriment of both the next generation and renters. San Francisco is a prime example [2] - SF needed to build 6X as many houses as it did between just 2012 and 2016 just to meet the job growth in the area. This pushes the price per square foot inside metros up way above what they would otherwise be.
(3) Zoning rules outside of major metros, including setback rules and minimum size rules, parking rules, etc, make houses outside metros much bigger. Also, expectations have shifted. This pushes the square footage of suburban homes up - and with it the total price.
(4) This applies mostly in the last few years - but lower interest rates make houses that are more expensive much more affordable on a monthly basis, which is totally fine as most folks end up with a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. A drop from 3% to 2% makes a house about 25% more expensive cost the same amount per month. Yes, it increases down payments, but down payments tend to be up to 20% of the price - so an increase not of 25% but 4%.
So what can we do? Easiest thing is state-wide or federal zoning rules. Build up. Allow smaller homes. [edit](Stop with the mandatory parking.) In Japan, supply and demand meet, and a new 3 bedroom house in Tokyo is like 400K USD [edited for current data] - right around the cost of construction. This is thanks to their federal zoning rules. [3]
[1] https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage
[3] https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning...
The board also just voted against turning a parking lot into a 500-unit apartment building, citing the recent Florida condo collapse as justification, and worrying that it will “gentrify” the corner of 6th and Market (!). https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/State-investigating-S...
Among other reasons, we should because the existing cities are the most resource-efficient and lowest-environmental-impact living places we have at scale, and typically subsidize the infrastructure of other places.
Small cities/large towns are actually more efficient on average in the US since everyone is a 10-15 minute drive of everything.
Rural areas can be very inefficient.
Seems like taking a short term hit in resource efficient and environmental impact in order to have people live elsewhere would be overall positive.
What's "smaller"?
It appears substantially more than half the country lives in a metro area smaller than the Columbus, OH MSA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
MSAs can sometimes be rather small in area -- for instance, the Bay Area is split into 9 MSAs, all but one of which (SF-Oakland-Berkeley) are less populous than the Columbus MSA. So, everyone in the South Bay lives in a MSA smaller than Columbus (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara).
If instead, say, you opted to take all CSAs with > 1 million people (per the 2020 census), you'd cover just over 2/3 of the population.
(Even so, affordability isn't purely a function of city size. Chicago is eminently more affordable than DC or SF despite being larger than either, whether you consider the CSA, MSA, or just the urban core.)
So to answer your question, because there's an enormous attack surface for elites to abuse the planning process to self-segregate, consume publicly funded infrastructure, and stick someone else with the responsibility for urban social problems
Average over what, though? I'd assume that 1sq in a dense metropolitan quarter in high demand goes for a lot more than 1sq in a poor neighborhood or in the middle of nowhere.
The global average doesn't really mean anything except "somewhere in the US there is still affordable housing".
Most critics of rising housing prices that I know of aren't arguing that housing is becoming unaffordable everywhere but that it's becoming unaffordable in high-density places where housing would be needed.
You acknowledge this in:
> This pushes the price per square foot inside metros up way above what they would otherwise be.
Also shouldn't actions include at least having a look at building speculation in high-density areas?
So as a tech worker who's lived in the "middle of nowhere" and worked remotely for 20 years, why the hell is anyone paying a premium to live in San Francisco now?
Maybe covid now changes this now, but the ability to have stores and RL venues without having to drive will stay in demand, I' pretty sure.
Suppose you and I both save 30% of out net income. If I'm making far more in a city then my 30% savings will go very far in a not city location.
We can also assume if you spend 100/month on rent and I spend 500/month on rent it's the same "percentage" of the pay we make.
Friend, that's not what average means.
It means that more than half all houses cost less than X (because average => median). Not "somewhere in the there exists something less than X".
> "high-density places where housing would be needed."
Well you got half the country (actually much more - closer to 2/3, given that average >> median in housing).
This has been brought to you by your local RUMIA (Responsible Use of Math In Arguments) league.
Stay frosty out there, people.
But it doesn't even have to mean that. It could also mean that certain undesirable neighborhoods cost far below the median, pulling the average down.
Absolutely false in the long term due to feedback, although it is true in the short term.
With lower interest rates, people bid up the price of houses because they can afford to spend more on their mortgage. The amount spent on mortgage repayments trends towards the same figure as always (approximately as much as your wages allow).
I believe houses are a prime mover of the middle class economy, because it is something most people are willing to “invest” a lot of time working to achieve owning the property they want (often status driven).
Uh uh, apartment, not a house.
There's a huge difference.
Traditionally SFHs tend to perform much better as investments than condos. When you’re in an environment of secularly rising prices, you’re heavily pressured to get on the property ladder.
People want to buy and own an SFH as soon as they can. Otherwise if they get a condo the risk is the SFH market moves away from them and they’ll be priced out when they need it.
That's the problem. Apartment is inhumane by default. No privacy, no private space. They shouldn't accept them.
And sure, there is a difference, but it is only minor as we are still speaking of living spaces that you own instead of rent.
Buying apartments here is actually more expensive than buying a standalone house, because they tend to keep their property value more than the houses (which usually are sold for the land - people tear the houses down and rebuild). If you're trying to verify what I'm saying, the apartments you'd buy here would be called a "Mansion", which is mostly a term for upscale apartment.
Edit: oh, I should mention that the interest rate here is insanely low (around 1% or as low as 0.5%), and you can get 35 year mortgages.
'Local German officials, like local leaders everywhere, seek bigger budgets to provide more and better services to their constituents. What’s different about Germany is that the way to get bigger budgets is to increase local populations. And, as Professor Buettner says, “Ultimately, to get people, municipalities will need to support housing.”
The result is a system of incentives that is the opposite of “fiscal zoning”—the US practice of zoning land in ways that maximize local governments’ income and minimize their costs. In places with high sales taxes, such as Washington State, leaders zone more land for shopping centers. In places where residential property taxes are capped, such as California, they zone less land for homes and more for offices. In affluent suburbs, they often zone land for houses on large lots, excluding low-income people.
Maximizing property values is such a central concern of local government in the United States that Dartmouth economist William Fischel developed the notion into an entire political theory. His “homevoter hypothesis” holds that local governments are almost single-mindedly focused on maximizing real estate values, because homeowners typically vote their home values in local elections. German jurisdictions gain financially by maximizing population, not house values, and because renters outnumber homeowners in the country, homevoters are not the dominant electoral force in local German elections. Renters are.'
https://www.sightline.org/2021/05/27/yes-other-countries-do-...
This is good, because it means people can afford more.
>> (2) City councils, and by extension zoning rules, in major metros preclude construction
This is good because unregulated growth is a net drain on society. No one wants to buy a house if the property next door can be turned into a 30 story apartment building. More people own property now than at any time in history. How about that? Stop making babies, right now, and there will be plenty of space for everyone. I don't have babies, I own a house, everyone who has babies wants not just to pollute the world with their offspring and tax me to pay for their spawn's upbringing, they also think they deserve free property. Just don't have babies and problem solved.
(4) Monthly payments on new mortgages are essentially fixed for any point in time. A drop in interest rates from 3% to 2% makes housing asset prices 25% more expensive, and along with them downpayments, real estate taxes, and the amount required to pay mortgages off early.
(1) In order for a house to keep up with market appreciation, it has to be a desirable to the future "average buyer". Monthly payments are relatively fixed, less bidding competition for land outside of metro areas means that the feedback effect in my (4) isn't as strong, and so a bit more money goes into the structure.
Real estate is the only asset class where this isn’t true. The existence of the mortgage, which is one of the most unique debt instruments available to the general public, means that house price inflation only needs to exceed interest rates about about 0.6% to beat stock market returns.
For one party to see returns exceeding interest, another party has to pay for that (exponential) rate of return. It's unaffordable for the second party.
These prices compound, exponentially, and as a result younger generations spend much more of their money in wealth transfers to older landowners. It's unsustainable unless the wages of younger generations also start to rise at similar rates, which isn't happening.
This is just factually untrue. House prices do not grow exponentially. The rate at which they grow goes up and down, but it’s never been exponential. The entire premise of your argument is indisputably incorrect.
If you used $1,000,000 to buy $20,000,000 worth of property in San Francisco, and you wanted to get a 15% annual return to beat the market, the numbers would look like this:
You’d be paying around $600,000 in interest, say you’ve got another $100,000 in expenses, and you want to get $150,000 for your return. That’s $850,000 that needs to come from somewhere, in San Francisco I think the rent to price ratio is about 1:50, so that’s $400,000 in rent, and the remaining $450,000 needs to come from house prices increasing. So to beat the market your property assets needs to appreciate by 2.25%, or about what the fed targets inflation to be.
This is only possible because the mortgage is a very unique debt instrument. As far as access to cheap debt goes, it is comparable only to the highest credit corporate and sovereign bonds. The only type of debt that a regular consumer has access to, that is somewhat comparable, are subsides student loans.
Current businesses don't want a competitive labor market in the sense they have to compete for your time, they want drones to do whatever they want and want to pay bottom dollar for it. Just look at the massive outcry right now claiming labor shortages. Maybe there is some shortage but it's a well justified shortage in my opinion.
If you had a labor force with a real basic sense of security, people not worried they may get sick and their entire life's accumulation of assets from work will be washed away in an instant or they may be out on the streets looking for a warm bed, then you have a strong labor force that can negotiate reasonable working conditions. We don't have that.
We largely have a growing precariate class of people that seem to be sweeping in low to lower middle income that seems to be growing into the middle income brackets. A large bit of middle and upper middle are fine but even there, pressure seems to be growing.
How many people out there are doing the 9 to 6 because of that? I am one of them. I have a software business idea, but I either need to:
1. Save a ton of money to pay the ludicrous levels of private health insurance.
2. Get married to a city or federal employee, so I can be on their health insurance.
In my case, it will be #2, but it's a total coincidence that she is one of those.
In the meantime, those of means have plenty of cushion to fall on, trying and failing over and over, until they hit it. Most of us don't have the option of failing even once.
To me it's mostly a sign of dislocated/fractured society with no coherent purpose. No calling for communism :)
Change education, add more pragmatic knowledge of everything to people's lives so they don't chase shiney and don't rely on money exchanges for things to happen in their day.
Maybe internet will help a bit here. Lots of people are learning about stuff through videos, we need to make it more tangible day to day I guess.
Mortgages currently dominate the average person's life.
I’ve taken long stretches off work and done all sorts of amazing, productive stuff during that time. I have friends whom I really respect completely fall apart when nobody’s ordering them around every day though.. they stop going outside, the lack of exercise and sunlight sends their meat suits into “depression mode”, and it’s a quick downward spiral
I’m hoping that having a whole society oriented around it would result in a more positive outcome
We already know. Look at housewives, people on disability, young people still living at home with their parents, and retirees. Arguably college students, too.
It is not the case that all (or most) people who don't have to pay rent suddenly spend significant amounts of their time volunteering. They pursue what they desire or find meaningful, just like everyone else. And it's not clear it's a better outcome than those who pay rent (or a mortgage).
Indeed, it's sickening, and there's a very well developed structure to stop the average person stepping outside of the system via a tiny house, van life etc.
Tiny homes are the mobile home of this generation, except less widely adopted. But they will depreciate, widening the gap between those who chose to purchase a traditional house and those who chose a simpler approach.
Van life and tiny homes are not suitable for 99.99% of families with children.
"I'm stepping out of the system" is actually "I'm too poor to stay in the system".
It looks like ~65% of households own a home, and about the same percentage of homes have a mortgage; the average household doesn't even have a mortgage.
In-group vs. out-group baiting, mayhem, & loss-of-life ensue. (h/t Frances Haugen)
A lot of housing problems result from the uneven and combined development inherent in capitalism. Physical and human capital floods to major sites of economic activity, leading to a positive feedback loop benefitting a small number of major cities. The rest of the country becomes a hinterland, sucked dry of business and anyone who has the option of leaving. In the UK, where I live, this is the major underlying cause of Scottish independence, and now the increasing calls for Welsh independence, and even Northern independence. The economy is asymmetrically built around London. That in turn makes it increasingly difficult for normal people to live in London (e.g. nurses and teachers). Zoning isn't going to fix that.
Rates are low everywhere, but housing costs are not exploding everywhere (in the West). Even with-in a single country like Canada, in the Toronto/SW-Ontario area prices are way up, but the Prairies are flat/down in most places.
> rather than a huge demand-side issue given asset price inflation consequent from QE, the expansion of private credit and the financialization of housing over recent times.
Some of the Commonwealth countries (CA, AU, NZ) have the higher rates compared to other countries (DE, CH, JP, FR), and yet have higher housing price rises:
* https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1446515836504743956
You'd think the cheaper-debt countries would have the bigger rises in prices.
In Toronto/GTA, prices have been going rising especially since 2015, when there was no QE going on. But there was a whole bunch more immigration without corresponding construction.
The solution isn’t that hard. Raise the real rate. Let’s see how many people can keep buying their third and fourth homes once the rates go up by 5%.
Oh but we can’t have that. That will cause the economy cough cough stock market tank. So we have to keep making the bubble bigger.
This statement is equivalent to saying that rents will never go down. And that's the core problem. Fiddling with interest rates or whatever is fine, but if your broader strategy results in every generation having to pay a larger fraction of their income on housing than the previous one, that is a problem...
It's exactly housing becoming an investment. In your post you precisely explain why it's a profitable investment, why that makes it unafordable, and the solution you propose is to make it an unprofitable investment. I think you and the OP agree completely.
The issue is that newly created housing is already priced sky high. You can blame quantitative easing which lowers interest rates and drives comodities we usually buy with credit high.
Just add another line to the graph and you'll see it.
Problem is not the market, but the fact someone is tempering with it so bad it inevitably collapses.
Why is it "supposed" to be this way?
It doesn't work this way in a lot of Asia. People don't want old, used homes and they lose value over time. Cities often don't have one specific point in the center (America's zoning is absolutely horrendous and forces this to happen) and so businesses, restaurants, shopping, activities, and so on are fairly equally spread across towns.
When American cities expand, they build more houses farther away but further condense business in the downtown core. But that's a problem that's politically invented and not so much a problem elsewhere.
Also in the EU country I live in schools are managed centrally and equally, so there is no such thing as a "good school district" I read happening in other countries, which seems to expand inequality and cause financial hardship to their population for no reason other than the ideological assumption that central planning is to be avoided.
Is this actually legit full true? It might be less of a gradient than other places, but in our two years in Norway our children went to two different public schools which were in immediately adjacent suburbs - both good locations, and there was a definite difference in the management of the schools which was visible through all our interactions with them.
The second school was clearly better in our experience, despite being part of the same system.
Norway isn't "EU" for those purposes, but I suspect it's similar. The same way that different hire car offices or different pizza parlours in the same "chain" can have quite different quality despite theoretically operating under the same policies.
(edited to add)
While these things, in theory, normalise out over time as staffing changes in individual schools or individual franchisees - your kids are often only at each school for a handful of years, so there'll definitely be some attempt to find the better ones based on what you hear from parents of kids a year or two ahead... and those with enough money to just move house into the "best" zone will still get their kids into the better school.
But what if they did? What if our governance said old homes must be updated? Then old homes would probably be worth less because it costs a lot to retrofit sometimes.
I may have some or many of those details wrong, just thought it was another example of how political decisions drive housing prices one way or the other.
You'll find a lot of people trapped in homes they cannot sell. The cost to update very old homes would far exceed what most people can spend out of pocket, and by the time they paid off the debt to do so, the codes may have changed again.
Also, older couples who have lived in one place many years and are now retired generally cannot take out lots of money. Instead of being able to sell and move to a senior community or nursing home, they would be stuck with a property they cannot maintain, compounding the problem.
Essentially, you would be hurting vulnerable people at the advantage of the young and wealthy.
If the updates were mandated as the code changed:
See all of the above, but now you're forcing people out of their homes even faster.
In the US ex post-facto laws are generally unconstitutional. Our law defaults to grandfathering (there are exceptions), so a change in code applies to new construction, or renovations to existing structures. My experience owning older properties is that this was not a feature. Often what would be a repair in a new property would lead to a major renovation because whatever was being worked on would have to "be brought up to code".
City centers exist, just look at tourism and public transport. It's more valuable when you can rent out apartment as AirBnb, it becomes more valuable when tourists can't drive, distance from museums and shopping malls increases value and possibility that the land you own could be bought out for development of high density building is what drives the value up.
Housing is not a bottle of water you can buy in groceries. Housing is one of the few things most of us buy on debt. If you increase the amount of debt people can take by lowering risks for banks, the price will rise.
Also there are many other factors like that cities that complain about high cost of housing mostly have draconian municipal building codes and zonings. Even racism has a play in it, it's truly interesting topic to study.
> Housing is one of the few things most of us buy on debt.
Hard disagree there. Most people I know buy phones, cars, bike, washing machines, computers, sofas, desks, and damn near everything else I can imagine on financing plans. I feel like a weirdo because I tend to save up for everything and not accumulate debt! But I also grew up in a very frugal household, so maybe others were raised differently.
In much of Europe the core of a city is much more expensive than the periferia.
Those areas are also very close to all amenities like top public transport connections, quiet green spaces, entertainment, good doctors, top companies, good schools, lawyers so walkability is top noch, you don't even need to use public transportation, let alone own a car.
Buildings in those areas are also typically much more spacious and more solid than the current matchboxes being built.
I don't think that's what they were describing. They were describing new homes, not old: I think the "supposed-to-be" pattern is up for 10-30 years after first being built, as the area is still growing and becoming more desirable, then down once the growth no longer outpaces the aging.
That is absolutely not true. There's a reason why it is called center in the first place. Amsterdam, for example is completely flooded by tourists in the center and not so much outside of it.
Look at the real estate market in Singapore or Tokyo where housing prices are more reasonable
If the town is expanding then the supply of housing goes up along with the demand and prices stay the same, i.e. proportional to the cost of constructing new housing.
Once you reach a certain point you have to build taller buildings which are more expensive to build and then housing prices would reflect the higher construction cost, but this only applies to urban areas and the costs only get really high when the buildings get really tall.
If you converted some of the suburbs to three story buildings that filled the lots, the cost per square foot wouldn't be much higher than it is for single family homes, but there would be ten times more housing per acre. Doing this is prohibited by zoning, which is the real reason why housing is unaffordable.
Forcing everyone to live in what they consider an undesirable hellscape isn’t good policy in either direction.
Right now, living in a suburb with people from the nearby city fleeing for greener pastures in my area or further out still, the paper value of my home is up 10% in a year-- as you say, making any loan on nearby homes effectively a negative rate.
Whereas using the interest rates my parents paid, a mortgage today for the same amount as they had, at their interest rates, would have 3x the monthly payment. The house itself is about 3.5x the original price, making the gap between effective living costs much smaller than the nominal sticker price on the house would make it seem.
The "don't buy a home mortgage for more than 2x-3x you annual salary" was advice formed at a time of much higher interest rates.
The prices of houses adjust very quickly to changes in interest rates because housing prices are based on what an "affordable" mortgage payment for the market is. Housing prices change to make that math work.
Interest rates and housing prices only matter to people who are buying a house that aren't selling one at the same time. Low interest rates are bad for first time home buyers and investors.
> The "don't buy a home mortgage for more than 2x-3x you annual salary" was advice formed at a time of much higher interest rates.
Also, when that adage was coined, the cost of the "essentials" required to live hasn't gone up as much so people have more of their income to spend on housing.
Buying a house when rates were 10% and watching them drop to next to 0 over 30 years must've been fun.
Of course Re: college there are other reasons, like government derisking lending by backing the loans, supporting higher and higher costs.
But it should be no surprise that debt fueled expenses are much much higher now. You can certainly say that carrying costs may be similar due to lower rates, but personally I'd much rather buy an asset at a high rate, and have the option of paying down quickly to become debt free.
Nowadays it's almost nonsensical to pay down your debt from an opportunity cost perspective. But even if carrying cost is low, there's an uncomfortable feeling when you live life by financing everything, and with high level of debt.
The question is, will we ever normalize, or will we follow Europe to negative rates?
The current Fed is too politicized to normalize policy. I think partly due to the greater public scrutiny of their moves. Almost everybody will vote for easy money if you give them the choice. Easy money is always the right choice in the very short term. The longer term distortions are the thing to worry about.
Lowering rates effectively initiates a one time transfer of wealth from the future generations to the present.
Not in US:
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...
The US Population growth is due to immigration not from citizens having more children. Immigration, and US Born children to immigrants account for 75 percent of annual population increase for the US.
If the population of this country stopped growing and started shrinking, a lot of real estate would be freed up. Demand for housing in the densest cities would drop, and it would be cheaper to live.
Real estate prices have gone up for the last hundred years because there are more people. This is why it has been an effective and predictable model for businesses like car dealerships to always locate on the outskirts of cities and wait for the city to come to them, sell the land and move further out.
There isn't anything nefarious or even strange about it. It's a natural result of population growth and increasing demand that consistently (so far) outpaces supply. Nor is it inevitable; look at China. Tons of empty apartments, cheap bordering on free to live in. That's what happens when supply outstrips demand.
Things like zoning laws, property taxes, taxes on investing in property all affect overall prices, it's never going to be pure supply and demand.
For example if a region/country wants to keep prices down, heavily tax second/third/fourth homes. Or provide tax incentives to new builds.
Then there's interest rates, one of the reasons that property prices in many countries are increasing is that the interest rates are low, so people looking to invest can't get a good return on their investment in "traditional" locations, so they turn to buying property to rent out.
But it does. The supply is partially driven by speculators who bet on the prices continuing to grow. Currently, a lot of people are buying more expensive houses than they need because "house is a good investment". This (the speculators) can be easily stopped with a policy - e.g. tax heavily all profits from real estate sales, incl. primary residences. If taxes make it next to impossible to profit on increase of house value (the profit goes to treasury and not to seller), then the market would significantly cool down.
The fact that we (for example) tax heavily income from work, but not from real estate speculation, is a CHOICE.
Look at the root causes of asset price inflation.
Governments can cause oversupply, governments can cause undersupply. Bet you can think of plenty of examples without my help of government policy resulting in supply for some goods decreasing or increasing relative to demand.
Governments can do a lot. Like, they can pretty much dictate what you're allowed to make, how much they're gonna tax you on profits from making something, who you're allowed to sell it to - they can absolutely decide to cause an asset to appreciate.
There are tons of tools any state has to motivate or demotivate markets. Taxes, rules on primary, secondary and investment residence ownership, same goes for rents etc.
I tend to see a clear pattern here, just like in other topics - folks who are profiting from current situation by already owning see nothing wrong - in contrary, market forces in effect etc. The more the better.
The rest not so much, ie younger generation thrown in the world where they probably will never own their residence, which can be pretty infuriating compared t situation say 20 years ago. There aren't that many more people to explain this. But the move to consider housing more and more as a speculative investment rather than commodity is definitely out there, everywhere.
The relevant unit of supply/demand here is mortgages, which are indeed controlled by government policies.
Are you suggesting credit should be loosened again so you don't need 20% down to buy a property?
Housing does not have to be fixed amount resource.
Without a policy to disincentive it, couldn't large asset holders purchase freed up real estate and artificially control the supply?
Buying up a bunch of real estate to drive up the price and sell for a profit also doesn't work. For the same reason that a pump-and-dump scheme needs other bag holders: when you start selling the price will drop too quickly
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
[3] https://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html, and prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076632
Look up negative gearing in Australia
In any case, you have to realize money will go somewhere. It will go into a bank vault or it will go into a house, or it will go into the stock market; people want a return on investment. If you outright make it onerous and expensive for the middle class to invest in real estate, the only real estate investors will then be trusts and speculators. This is a simple fact any time a government goes after small land holders.
In communist regimes they did exactly this.
And what would be ideal, in a healthy market, is that housing is sometimes a little overbuilt and becomes a bad investment, then becomes very affordable and a good investment. Sitting at some sort of market equilibrium if you will. Investors consistently winning is bad for affordability, and investors always losing means eventually nobody will build houses and people start having to live outside.
This. I don't understand why people think that it's their fundamental right to live somewhere where they want.
Policy though can help prevent the asset price from being driven further by speculative investors, using tax penalties that heavily favor owner occupiers. It’s difficult to get right because there’s an argument to allow investors to participate, as it drives investment and effort into new house building.
But right now, 0% rates for businesses has flowed into large scale purchases of residential homes by Zillow, Redfin and others, who used their data positioning to capitalize on the flight to the suburbs due to Covid. That is what has devastated affordability. There’s no broad social benefit there, I hope it stops.
Not really. It's fine to "invest" in something that just outperforms holding cash, or bank deposits. Trillions of dollars are invested in treasuries.
You can even invest in something with negative expected returns, if it hedges exactly the risks you will face in the future (eg, the risk of accommodation costs rising is offset by owning a house, because you will always need somewhere to live).
So you can make housing an attractive investment for medium-net-worth individuals, say, that section of the population that can afford to own 1-2 houses over their lifetime, without it becoming less affordable over time. You can use tax incentives to tweak this further: many jurisdictions give you a lot of tax relief on your first home.
So, what causes house prices to rise faster than incomes is not an approach of making housing an investment per se, but a focus on making it an investment competitive with the stock market and attractive to institutional investors seeking outright yield.
If it is an investment, it has to be competitive by definition. Otherwise your aim is something different than investment, which should be the case for housing ideally.
No, it just has to yield profits higher than the inflation rate. Not all investments have the same return.
[1]: e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown
For example, the U.S. is slightly below average in mortgage debt-to-income. One of the few places that the U.S. stands out is the percentage of home owners--we're second from the top at 40-50%.
You can make any graph look scary if you try hard enough haha.
I've never found agreement when speaking out against renting on HN. Empty houses outnumber the homeless 6 to 1 [0] and yet somehow it's more important that we ensure landlords can protect their effortless investments and waste more and more land on non-dense, temporary housing.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/agbo4...
Quite the opposite of what some comments here suggest, encouraging home ownership keeps life affordable. It is one way to stave off an oligarchy of property owners.
See, for example, Fannie Mae's mission,
> Our mission is to facilitate equitable and sustainable access to homeownership and quality affordable rental housing across America. We continue to innovate and promote a stronger, safer, and more efficient housing finance system to support more opportunities for homebuyers and renters in communities throughout the nation.
https://www.fanniemae.com/about-us/who-we-are
Finance people who make loans take issue with this since they have to match prices with a "government-backed" business, although it's only a charter which isn't the same as govt-backed. Plus, tons of businesses were supported by government in 2008 and 2020-2021 so that point is moot.
A better way would be to ensure that supply can continue to increase with demand, rather than encourage speculative buying and holding of land off the market in the hopes of making a fortune flipping it to the next generation and slowing down any attempt to redevelop. "Oh at least you're locked in" is at best a patch.
>See, for example, Fannie Mae's mission,
Yes, that's what they say but that translates into making housing an investment, which (see the several other comments on this point) goes directly contrary to it being affordable. I don't see what's better about mom-and-pops milking the next generation rather than a big conglomerate -- the result is the same.
>Finance people who make loans take issue with this since they have to match prices with a "government-backed" business, although it's only a charter which isn't the same as govt-backed. Plus, tons of businesses were supported by government in 2008 and 2020-2021 so that point is moot.
Wait, what? Finance people love Fannie Mae and the like because it means they can dump mortgages on a government agency merely because they meet some ossified standard rather than being legitimately below risk thresholds by a realistic assessment. And then not have to worry about fixing a rate that's too low for 30 years.
No. They are glad the government is buying away the risks from them, enabling them to give more loans to people who might not afford to pay for them.
Government subsidised mortgages are the cause of this. The technical implementation varies in different countries.
House prices are "levered" on mortgage interest rates.
It began when boomers entered the housing market. I.e. suddenly a lot more people wanted houses.
Before then, houses depreciated over time, like your car.
First off, I don't think a typical investment thesis is: this thing will be less affordable in the future. People invest for many other reasons other than simply capital appreciation. With housing specifically, it might be cheaper for you to buy vs rent.
> country decides to stop making policy
So, yes... US policies towards housing are all centered around the notion of taking out a massive loan for a home. You get paid to do it in some ways, through interest deductions for example. And yes, this policy will never change and this is probably the main reason you need to buy a house with a mortgage if youre in the US.
However, as a counter-example I know handful of countries where mortgages are not easy to get and not a traditional way to finance a home. Yet, home prices in these regions are also skyrocketing. So cheap leverage alone is not a necessary factor for home price appreciation.
Finally: Food and transport can be "replenished" - land cannot. So basic supply and demand concepts would say that land prices will increase, and by proxy so will housing.
Land taxed appropriately would incentivize higher density housing in order for the economics to work.
We’re in a weird incentive trap (in the Bay Area anyway) where owners protected by prop13 have massive wealth and are incentivized to restrict supply. New owners that manage to over pay for a home are further incentivized to restrict supply to keep prices high so they’re not underwater.
This is a bad feedback loop that creates real property scarcity. It’s also arguably a problem of regulation constraining the market’s ability to meet demand appropriately.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/blog/2021/09/09/housing-price...
It is, but the upthread reference to “housing” actually meant “home ownership”, not the “housing” that is part of inflation (residential rents, actual and imputed).
Sadly this has become a meme response, always repeated in every housing topic. Can we dig deeper? What would it mean?
A house has value, one can live in it, a basic human need. It also takes raw materials and skilled labor to create. Both of those go up over time, so building an identical house in the future will nearly always cost more than today.
Thus, that house can't help but appreciate in value. At a minimum, with inflation. Even that makes it a decent investment with minimal risk.
So you propose a house should depreciate? How, exactly? And would you want to live in those conditions?
One way to have housing depreciate is to have the economy of the region collapse (e.g. Detroit). But clearly that's not a good solution.
Maybe another way is to build houses with such bad quality that they disintegrate before the mortgage is paid off. But that's not an attractive solution either, I don't want to live in such a structure.
So what exactly are you proposing?
Plenty of reasons why a home should not increase in value,just because. Where this becomes really irksome to me is for rentals. Unfortunately most landlords do the bare minimum with regards to upkeep (financially this just makes the most sense I bet), but they can easily upsell it to the next investor, if they're in a good area.
Why do people keep saying this? No, it doesn't. If house prices went up 1.5% per year they would be a perfectly good investment but would not become less affordable.
Investments are graded based on their expected real rate of return, over time... In simple terms, that would be the increase in the nominal value of the asset, minus inflation. The higher the increase in real value, the better the investment.
If an asset's value increases faster than inflation, then over time the real price of the asset is rising. That means less and less people will be be able to afford it, each year.
Remember, inflation is basically measuring how much purchasing power we have... So if the price of something is rising faster than inflation, by definition that thing is becoming more expensive, which means less people will be able to afford it.
Even though 1.5% real (above inflation) appreciation seems like a small number, the total appreciation will eventually grow quite large after several years... Each year, housing will become affordable to fewer and fewer people. It may take a while to notice, but that's the definition of a rising real asset price.
I don't care if it's much worse than the stock market. All a house has to do is hold your money pretty steady against inflation and it will be an acceptable investment.
If the intent is "houses can't beat the stock market and remain affordable" then that's what people should say, because that's very different from just being "an investment".
And for what it's worth my intent was a number slightly below inflation, because it doesn't really matter if it's half a percent over or half a percent under.
> Remember, inflation is basically measuring how much purchasing power we have... So if the price of something is rising faster than inflation, by definition that thing is becoming more expensive, which means less people will be able to afford it.
That's only true if you assume wages stay steady with inflation, and they don't have to do that.
If house prices would grow faster than inflation but slower than wage growth then everyone could be pretty happy with the result.
If prices rise faster than wages across the board there will be a correction at some point: quite simply prices cannot go higher than what people can pay.
And in fact earnings from capital now surpass earnings from work in the world (or is it in the west?). So I suspect house prices will continue to rise faster than wages, until enough people got fed up.
they are not comparable things.
Capital can be deployed on massive scale, but for work, a human only has at most 24hrs to work (if they don't sleep).
Local government (US): Low-density zoning, burdensome review processes on new development, "historical building" preservation, minimum amenity regulations (e.g., parking spaces, "set back"), etc.
Federal government (US): Subsidizing the cost of 30-year mortgages for lenders; subsidizing mortgage interest for homebuyers (mortgage interest deduction) at the expense of all other taxpayers (e.g., renters).
> Are there countries with policies that effectively make it a depreciating asset? What do those policies look like?
I can't speak to the specifics of what other countries do, but many of the obvious steps are to just stop the bleeding that we already know about, mentioned above. Eliminating the federal mortgage interest deduction, removing local government authority to impose arbitrarily burdensome processes on new development, upzoning, deregulating (no minimum parking, reduced minimum setback), etc.
If the mortgage interest deduction disappeared tomorrow, the landlord's cost to own that house would go up, and every penny of that increase would have to be passed on to the renter.
So while it's true a renter doesn't have that tax deduction, eliminating it isn't going to lower any rents, only raise them.
Say I bought a house on a half acre for $500k. Then someone buys it for $750k and builds four houses on eight acre lots and sells them each for $300k. Owner occupied housing as an investment has produced a positive return but the cost of housing has gone down.
In your example, if local government instead forbids that development (via zoning), maybe you can sell your house for $1M instead of $750k, because those 8 prospective buyers are now bidding on the only available property.
Homeowners that view housing as an investment would prefer to see housing costs rise further (beyond benefiting solely from land value increases), and so they advocate their local governments to constrain housing supply via zoning. On the west coast, and particularly in California, they've been very successful.
Whoa. "By definition", investments have to go up after accounting for inflation?
I've never been convinced that any investment can go up faster than inflation forever. But you say they all do?
Also, I'm wondering what the phrase "you make housing an investment" means. Who makes it so? What do they do? How does it ensure it goes up?
I bought a house recently. Dealing with the mortgage and properly industry really brought home to me how deeply entrenched the housing as investment mindset is.
When houses were shown to me their likelihood of appreciation was highlighted before qualities of the house like it’s construction or the social health of the neighborhood. It was a bit frustrating because the latter types of things were what I wanted to know about. I bought the house to live in and it all goes well our family plans on staying indefinitely.
IMHO it will never change without a brutal prolonged housing crash and recession that wipes out the savings of millions, and the government will not allow that because homeowners tend to vote at the highest rates. 2008 showed that the government will burn down the rest of the economy to save property prices. The history of this power dynamic is actually quite deep. In many ancient societies and even early America property owners were the only ones with a voice or in some cases were the only true citizens. Civilization has always revolved around property owners at least since the agricultural revolution.
There is only one rational response that I see, especially for younger or lower income people: leave areas with absurdly exploding real estate costs.
The phenomenon is nationwide but it is definitely worse in some areas than others. When we bought our house we took advantage of the virtualization of software and left California for Ohio where we grew up. Now housing is exploding here, but less than it is on the West Coast.
Not everyone can be this mobile but more people probably can than you would think. If you are in a blue collar profession there are good jobs to be had (and sometimes a shortage) in rural and small city areas with industry. Many such areas also have shortages of lots of professions due to the many decade trend of everyone flocking to top tier cities.
Politically America really needs a rural renaissance and this could help drive it. The geographic concentration of wealth is a major driver of our political lunacy.
I am a bit older but if I were starting out I would include the real estate cost constraint in planning my career path. Yes there are great jobs in big cities but the RE cost means that when you want a family you must be either get rich or leave and while you are there all your surplus will go to the landlord.
It would make sense to avoid career paths that shackle you to high cost real estate. For techies that means maybe choosing industrial IT or coding for industrial or mining or farming concerns over Silicon Vallet cloudhipster stuff, or refusing to work for companies that are not remote first.
That's how it ever was and will probably always be.
In the 90s I wanted to live in Manhattan, wanted it so bad it hurt. But never found anything affordable, so it didn't happen. I moved to California instead, which was then still fairly cheap.
Plenty of areas have seen depreciation in housing but it’s because the entire area is doing so.
Living in New Hampshire in one of the most desirable historic villages, where in the village house prices are quite high, it is not lost on me that I have seen 20-30 strip malls and innumerable cul de sacs built in my life, but no new villages. Despite everyone agreeing that they are the one of the most desirable places to live.
There are no shortage of coordination problems yet to be solved, here.
The increase in housing price is probably a derivative of shifting or shrinking opportunity to earn a high income outside of centers of commerce and population growth x scarcity in metros. The rise in home prices is just a premium on income opportunity.
The exception of course is if it's impossible to make a profit using the asset. Rent controls are very effective in this regard: If you ensure that being a landlord yields no operating profit, the only incentive to buy property is if there's hope of future capital gains.
Also buying anything can be or not an investment. If you buy some bananas expecting to sell them for profit, then it is an investment.
Should countries also stop buying and selling bananas for profit? After all, eating is a basic need, more so than housing.
What makes most house buying decisions speculative is how the market price is justified. And today the "residual value" (value of the asset when you sell it) dominates buying decisions. This is defined as speculation (in future market price).
Without residual value, the market for old houses would be like the market for old cars or bicycles.
Imagine if government legislation enabled lenders to lend random amounts with old cars as security: it would put a price floor on second hand cars. Since second hand cars are of limited supply, and ownership of such a car enables you to borrow at minimal rate, therefore the market price of an old car becomes the value of the getting that loan.
America subsidizes homeownership specifically so now everyone does that, but people’s first and only house is definitely an investment.
Housing is a basic need, homeownership isn’t one, any more than running a farm is a basic human need.
Every California rental I've lived in for the past five years had the owner residing in it as their primary residence, renting out the spare rooms, while doing one of two things: not declaring any of the rental income while still getting primary residence tax breaks, or declaring it as a full rental (and using another address as their primary address, despite not living there), and writing off the exorbitant Bay Area HOA fees.
Which policy? You mean government charters for e.g. Fannie Mae that were established in part to combat behavior like redlining, which excluded certain ethnicities from loans for certain neighborhoods based on the loan applicant's skin color?
US government used $200 billion of taxpayers money to revive Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Those money will lower the cost of borrowing and thus push the prices up. A new crisis will come, people will lose their houses, Fannie Mae will lose the tax payers money. The government will give Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac $400 billion this time, thinking that $200 billion was clearly not enough.
Housing can increase price and also become affordable.
The scarce asset is not actually land but infrastructure such as roads, water, sewage and electricity. These are usually financed publicly, but the increase in land value usually befalls the lucky house owners. Here is one of the justifications for property tax.
What do you propose?
2. Have you never owned a house? Houses break down all the time.
But more houses may always be built.
And I do disagree that houses are not depreciating assets. The technology and the style of a house become outdated. And much deteriorates over time. Yes, the land may not depreciate, but that is a separate matter from, or, at best, only a component of the value of the house.
Yes, they depreciate, and much faster than you imagine before you have seen it. This can be experienced in buildings in depopulated towns that have been vacant for only a few years. Houses that are not heated/vented/repainted/repaired become complete write-offs in just a few years. (and remodelling bathrooms and kitchens doesn't count.)
Maintaining a house at equilibrium is a negative cash flow that grows over time.
The same is true for infrastructure such as roads, water, sewage, and so on.
> Killing housing values will take money away from hundreds of thousands of people who worked hard for what they have.
Making housing more affordable will allow hundreds of thousands of hard-working people to own their own homes, rather than being at the mercy of a rental market that can kick them out on short notice. For context, I consider significant increases of rent to be equivalent to kicking somebody out, and short notice to be anything less than half a year, as moving is a stressful and time-consuming prospect.
> Why can’t we champion hard work?
That's exactly why the housing market needs a correction. Because currently, hard work is not sufficient to get into the housing market.
> Why should anyone get anything for free?
To answer the question at face value, because we are all human, and every human deserves to have their basic needs for food, shelter, clothing, and health-care met. To answer the question in context, that's why propping up the housing market to the benefit of real-estate speculators and homeowners need to stop, because that is given a benefit for free.
I say these as somebody who is in a similar position, having recently purchased a house to live in. What I got out of it is a place to live that I can modify and improve as I want. It isn't an investment opportunity, it's a place to live.
Edit: I'm suggesting that feeding (and housing) yourself is a personal responsibility, not a collective one. And that the instrument we use to enforce basic order and peaceful coexistence (punish noncompliance with imprisonment) is far to blunt for enforcing cooperation (helping each other find food/shelter).
This would be an interesting topic if food in the US weren't already the cheapest in the entire world. [1]
[1] https://www.ecowatch.com/worlds-cheapest-food-is-in-the-u-s-...
If their intent was to make homes more affordable they would intervene in the offer side not on the demand side.
It would simply have been better to just make a construction company and sell homes at cost.
Regardless it's extremely affordable for most people