It seems inhumane to me to hope that one can profit off of homelessness and a reduction in the overall quality of life of your fellow citizenry.
Umm... landlords profit off of homelessness by eliminating it. That would normally strike me as socially beneficial.
It's about as inhumane as a grocery profiting off of people's urgent need to eat on a daily basis.
Not quite what I mean. I'm talking about the fact that housing is a poor field in which to apply demand-side economic policies.
Housing is a place, where, if one wanted to make housing more accessible, you must improve the supply. Supply-side policies are necessary here in order to bring down materials costs and to continue to build more housing to bring prices down.
If the cost became low enough, and people learned proper saving habits, mortgages would no longer be necessary and people would stop treating a durable consumer good like an investment.
Housing is not an investment, it should never be treated as an investment. Only by artificial tampering with the market or a self-perpetuating case of mass delusion could ever make people believe housing was anything other than a durable consumer good.
The real estate situation leading up the crisis of today was wholly unnatural and unhealthy.
If you want to increase your net worth, invest your money in a solid business or make your company.
In a large number of places, housing prices are not all that dependent on materials costs. (Or rather, other things drive up the price to the point that people spend more on materials because that doesn't have much effect on the overall price.) Instead, they're driven by land use and other policies.
> Housing is not an investment, it should never be treated as an investment.
Housing is a large pile of resources. While it's a durable good for consumers, it's an investment for housing providers, builders, and so on.
More to the point, things that people do for profit are far more likely to happen than things that people do "for the common good" or some other reason. And the desire for profit is what drives prices down.
Investment is a great way to get profit involved.
but what about people that already have giant piles of cash on hand? ... who can buy houses w/o taking any loans at all
in particular, if people are greedy enough to cause this mess, why are they not greedy enough to benefit from it?
It's just another variable amongst others with temporally varying degrees of importance.