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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

> For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners are the real estate market.

This is an interesting way of framing the demographic problem, yes. In the US for example, from WW2 thru roughly GFC, working age population grew faster than the retired age population.

So there was relative political power in the working age, and a large/growing group to sell houses to. Further, pre-GFC there was a big trade-up market even for existing homeowners.

Now demographic & politic power in the west are in the hands of the older, homeowner retired/near retired baby boomers. Incentives to reduce the value of their largest asset are not strong. Also this is why we keep electing dinosaurs in the US.

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>> Incentives to reduce the value of their largest asset are not strong

Its not just incentives. It can nuke entire economy if done not carefully.

Ideally new housing supply would be slowly increasing so that prices stop growing and there are incentives to invest into other assets but at the same time not reduce the wealth people have been building for many years.

But overall it seems like the world would be a much better and prosperous place if basic need like housing would be more of a commodity than a wealth driver.

If you have housing you can spend your income on building companies, wealth, experiments etc.

If you spend 30 years buying a place to live - obviously your hands are tight pretty badly.

No, the problem is considering owning a home part of wealth at all. I don’t even really understand the thought process, and I own a home and sold a rental because being a landlord blows.

You can only ever realize the gain of wealth of owning a home when you sell, which means you probably need a place to live now, so you rent, or buy another house. Maybe if you buy a smaller home than the one you moved out of you can pocket the difference, but because prices keep going up, that doesn’t seem very feasible either, less so if the home you sold wasn’t large to begin with.

I don’t get it. I much prefer owning to renting, and I have never considered owning a home more than a liability. In fact I need to annually make sure my insurance coverage is greater than the value of my home in case I get sued for some reason, just so “they” can’t come after my home.

I feel the same way about wills and people passing away. 95% of the time, by the time your parents die you’re either retired or close to it. I plan to provide for my kids when they’re least able to (college thru about age 30) and figure out after that if I want my last check to bounce or not.

We have such a backwards way of looking at wealth, it boggles my mind.

Boomers are a scapegoat, used a bit like immigrants, minorities and AI as an excuse for attacks on the working class.

The US is an plutocratic oligarchy, not a boomerocracy:

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

The candidates which would pursue popular policies tend to get nixed via underhanded political means before ascending to higher office. The oligarchy uses campaign financing and the media they own as a club to beat the two parties into submission and to stamp out any kind of populist opposition which wants to pursue policies which are oligarchy-unfriendly.

This includes any kind of reform which might interfere with the value of their property portfolios or redirect their streams of unearned rental income.

Boomers in the US are a scapegoat because they benefited during the great build out of housing in suburbs by moving there, and then became NIMBYs insisting everything remain "just so" now that they own all the houses.

The large pensionfunds are half of the oligarch class

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