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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it is in fact quite wrong and one of the biggest obstacles in American society is fetishization of homeownership.

You may object to it, but a home has been the smartest investment I've ever made.

The "fuck you got mine" attitude so many homeowners have and deliberate supply restriction to increase property values makes it a smart investment on paper, at the cost of screwing everyone else coming after you.

I'm not sure why it has to be that way. Build more houses.

then it wouldn't be "smartest investment"

I moved from an expensive real estate market to a less expensive one. That has nothing to do with appreciation — just equity.

Further, when I downsize — even in the same real estate market — that too is equity working in my favor independent of appreciation.

How is getting your own money back, many years later, without appreciation "equity working in [your] favor"?

Without the appreciation (and leverage multiplying that), buying housing would be nowhere near as good an investment. (As it stands today, it's phenomenal, of course.)

The alternative of course is giving your money to a landlord (and zero equity and zero money back). That is certainly less favorable?

I'm on team "own the home you live in if your circumstances allow", but if there was no appreciation, your equity isn't "working for you" in any way that I can detect/imagine.

The problem is “where”.

Building them in random lots in Florida or upstate New York is exactly what builders were doing in the runup to the financial crisis.

Building them in already-dense places is always tricky because of NIMBYism

Due to the massive influx of wealth caused by the pandemic. Median adult wealth is made from real estate, not stocks or a golden job.

https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/the-assets-households...

In fact, I feel everyone should own and anyone with two properties should be taxed heavily.

The restrictions on supply are generally economical. Every day, building gets more expensive; labor and parts both cost more. That is going to cause the average home to cost more, even older ones, as you always have the option to get a new build at current rates or an older one for slightly cheaper.

Why is it wrong to want to have equity in the place you live? "Ownership" could be a house, it could be a townhome, it could be flat. But in the US, "owning" an apartment is very rare, while real estate investors buy up all the valuable land in the urban cores of cities and rent it.

If you want equity in real estate nobody is stopping you. The problem is when people get this idea that we need to discourage investors from building very greatly desired rental housing.

This is the big problem with treating your home as an investment. People who just want a place to live near where they work now have to play this game too. And it's not cheap game.

That was what rentals were supposed to be. And then there was also such a thing as a "starter home". From what I see in Omaha, it's the developers that got greedy — figuring they could get more dosh turning a higher-end home than a starter home on the same lot.

That’s not greedy though? Are you greedy if you build more valuable software and then charge more for it?

Of course it's greed. The question is how ethical the greed is in a given situation. If it's luxury software, no problem. If it contributes to a housing affordability issue, not so much.

I'm pretty sure investors are persuaded by money and little else — if renting is profitable they'll build rentals.

> if renting is profitable they'll build rentals

The point is it's difficult and expensive to build in America. The core competency of construction in most cities is knowing how to grease the community boards', planners', affordable-housing advocates' and permitting offices' palms.

it isn’t really all that difficult, but it is difficult to build in the places that the jobs are.

There are tons economically depressed towns that would absolutely love to have an infusion of property tax revenue

My problem is that the wealthy get wealthier while the middle class gets subjugated to permanent renter class.

Go ahead, develop! And sell equity in the property. I've wondered if I would support my city requiring a certain percentage of dense urban lots be flats for sale vs. rental.

The problem isn't home ownership, it's zoning regulations being done locally so that areas full of owner-occupied single-family homes are the only ones eligible to vote on whether higher density housing can be built there, in combination with the "got mine" attitude that causes them to vote in the way that constrains supply.

It's good for people to be able to own their homes. They should be able to own their homes instead of paying a large fraction of their paycheck to landlords as rent or banks as mortgage payments. But that requires housing costs to get lower rather than higher, which in turn requires some kind of state- or national-level policy to prevent local homeowners from sustaining the opposite.

> fetishization

Yes and: As you know, encouraging home ownership is policy. Meant to reduce elderly poverty. It worked, plus all sorts of adverse effects that now hitting hard.

I'd rather we had pensions, universal healthcare, and maybe ponies.

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