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Comment by joe-collins | Hacker News Reader

Which begets the question of why we should allow housing to be an investment.

Because we’ve allowed it to be an investment—there’s no take-backs now. Entire swaths of the population (including Joe Homeowner) have built their financial picture around this model at this point. To unwind it now would eliminate the greedy investors, but with vast collateral damage of the nest eggs of millions of people who have borrowed against home equity based on a valuation with rental potential priced in.

I’m not saying this is a good thing, but we can’t just wave a wand and make housing-as-investment go away without creating real hardship for people (whose lives we are trying to improve with these measures, running counter to the goal).

Housing is and always has been an investment. I think you are objecting to the rate of return on that investment and incentives.

Even homesteading a log cabin on free land or building a mud hut is an investment. Houses take significant labor and materials to construct and there is no way around this. Add and land which can either be created nor destroyed and this only becomes more obvious.

Graeber & Wengrow would like a word

I looked up the reference, but dont see the relevance.

dawn of everything or their academic papers expand on historical social freedoms when it came to living under abundance or scarcity, housing and mobility, resource sharing, lack of hierarchical structures even at scale and after discovering agriculture

I obviously havent read it, but I beleive my point is more general.

Housing is an investment because it represents significant input in material and labor which only returns ulity slowly over time. It doesnt matter if are living in a commune, capitalist society, or alone. That only changes who invests in it.

If everyone could accessibly own a home free and clear, there'd be less incentive to work; it's a household's largest expense. That and employed-provided health care coverage.

What about just affording a mortgage or rent without college education, dual incomes, moving away, having few or no children, plus receiving an inheritance?

Social housing is a thing in much of the world. Housing is cheap in many countries around the world as well. Healthcare is free in most of the world and good standard in majority of the developed world.

Social housing tends to exist in countries where housing isn't cheap, for obvious reasons.

And "free in most of the world" dramatically oversimplifies an entire spectrum of healthcare funding models.

Healthcare is not free, it's taxpayer funded and consumes a huge portion of the national budget.

You think people would just stop earning money if they owned a house outright?

Have you met people?

Because we use interest rates as a control variable - despite there being little actual evidence of down regulation.

That causes a boom and bust in housing production and turns housing into an investment - like the classic car market.

We saw a similar effect during the pandemic when the used car market became like the classic car market due to lack of supply.

The solution was to get back to producing more cars. Same with housing.

Because we want the decisions on where and how much new housing to build to be made efficiently?

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