Housing is expensive because homeowners want it to be and homeowners vote more than non homeowners. Everything else is a side effect of that.
I also have two daughters who are young adults and still living at home because they can't afford rent. So even for that reason alone I REALLY don't want expensive housing prices.
You’re already profiting simply by having a higher net worth.
The benefit comes from gains being definitively accumulated by percentage. When your owned amount is higher, equal percent gain is greater absolute gain.
> Gains are locked into a property until sold or mortgaged.
This is essentially the equivalent of "Gains are locked into money until spent on goods or services." True. But gains are gains and worth is worth regardless of how many seconds or minutes it takes to spend. The only difference is immediate urgency of conversion within a very narrow time window (it does not take that long to get a mortgage on an owned property that is now worth X percent more than it was yesteryear).
Maybe "profit" was a poor choice of words. But this has turned into an utterly meaningless semantic argument that has nothing to do with the point I was trying to make.
No, they're saying the price of the house is irrelevant. If they bought both houses for $250k, say they're now worth $750k, they're a millionaire and got a million dollars of profit!
Their point is they need two houses for their family and will until they die. If they have two houses still worth $250k or two houses worth $750k it doesn't matter to their quality of life.
If having more money available to you through conversion doesn't have a direct and measurable impact on your quality of life, that's exclusively because of decisions you make about what to do with it. Assets don't follow you into the afterlife, so, bare minimum, when you get old you can sell it and rent or put a mortgage on it and have a much bigger pile of cash to spend until you die than the person with the less valuable house would.
Or, if you have children and are into such things, you can engage in massive generational wealth transfer and make it so they never have to work a day in their lives to cover rent. There are a lot of people out there who don't get to experience such a wondrous bounty that they didn't do anything to earn but which is an extremely relevant benefit with extremely measurable impacts on quality of life nonetheless.
The benefit is having that option.
There's something about money that brings out the worst in people, whether that be malice or simply stupidity.
However, home prices are, many times, also a reflection of the local economy and the earning and/or spending power of the locals (or tourists). And usually, higher earning/spending power is better than lower earning/spending power.
You just have to ensure you are in position to grab a portion of that economic activity, which is a better situation to be in than trying to grab a portion of no or little economic activity in a struggling region.
As an aside, my property has approximately doubled (in Zillow guesstimate and in assessed value) since we bought it in 2007. Our property taxes over that time went from around $8K to around $12K. An inflation calculator over that period would say that $8K in 2007 is worth $11.7K today, suggesting that property taxes track general inflation much more closely than they follow property values.
So, my property has doubled in nominal value, representing a 36% increase in real dollars, while my property taxes have gone up by only 3% in real terms.
Edit to add: inflation of course massively helps mortgage borrowers. If I bought my house for 100 units of currency, borrowing 80 and the currency change worth such that it now takes 147 units of currency to buy the house (just from inflation effects), then I still owe only the original 80 units of the now less valuable currency (minus principal repaid in the meantime). Inflation just paid off over 30% of my mortgage for me.
Correct, but that is because the current politics are all about shifting the burden to future generations, and one of those ways is vis drastic subsidies to land owners from non land owners via undeservedly low land value taxes.
Perhaps my claim of 1 to 1 relationship between property (land value) tax and land/house price is too strong, but at some point, it will have to go higher and catch up.
This is the reason that "you need housing so why would you want house prices to go up" -> some large fraction of homeowners are levered up to their eyeballs
Specifically, when do they vote and on what do they vote? If you dig into this you eventually end up with the premise of the article.
In a past life I wanted to build dense housing. i.e. more units per square meter. I went to buy land, and at the same time started going through the bureaucratic process of getting things approved by the government so that I could start building.
I have the necessary know-how to build what I wanted with my own resources, I was willing to apply for all permits necessary. However, I got turned down flat by the government. The only thing I was allowed to build on this land was ONE house. The land could have fit 15+ houses or an apartment building with dozens of units, but no, the city zoning board had decreed that this land was zoned ONLY to single family housing. So the only thing that could be built on this site was one single family house. Guess who the members of the zoning board were that turned me down? Local homeowners, who did not want to see the character of their neighborhood change.
This is the root of the problem. The free market is not allowed to function, because of this process.
And the thing is: this same process exists in every metro area in the US. Zoning boards populated by local homeowners with no desire to change anything.
The economic incentives already exist for denser, more affordable, housing; but developers are not allowed to build anything other than what the land has been zoned for. The people in charge of that zoning have the opposite incentive, they want their beautiful, low-density, neighborhood to never change.
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
There is a method actually though. Voters of the state can vote for state laws that affect all cities, and voters of the nation can vote for national law repesentives that affect all cities.
And it ultimately seems like politicians have more to fear from the immediate prospect of losing votes from NIMBY constituents than the potential gain of future votes years down the line from grateful new residents.