America's Magical Thinking about Housing

-- "If homeownership is best understood as an investment, like equities, we should root for prices to go up. If housing is an essential good, like food and clothing, we should cheer when prices stay flat—or even when they fall. Instead, many Americans seem to think of a home as existing in a quantum superposition between a present-day necessity and a future asset." --

I completely agree; we should build more damn houses. It's better for everyone except people seeking to extract rent from land values.

That said, it's going to be incredibly hard to circumvent the system of incentives we've set up for home-ownership in the US. Building codes are one thing, but baking property ownership into policy as a core investment vehicle is another... Building ARE commodities, and should not be treated as speculative assets in a healthy society.

Aside from building more (which we should do!), thinking about property ownership incentives is another side of the coin that deserves attention -- this is likely what enables the self-deception required to forget the basic laws of economics, as Thompson discusses here.

gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/austin-tex...