I've thought about that for a while and agree that's a big problem. I wonder if people unwilling to 'exit' bear some responsibility too?

I agree most owners are incentivized to have their leveraged ROIC be high. So they put pretty strong pressure against supply increases.

Defectors (other neighborhoods, cities, regions, states) and other living options might tank actual long term ROIC of supply constrained places. The economics eventually stop working in the supply constrained place as the real cost of housing production is significantly lower elsewhere.

I've always wondered if UBI can replace the category of "viable asset class" that homes are now, wherein UBI offers upward mobility now AND generational wealthy in the future - the same way owning a house does. Wouldn't that be a valid populist play, an actual policy rooted in pragmatic, and all-around a winning strategy?

And stop allowing people who view their house(s) as an investment from being able to veto any and all building. While that incentive is present, there will be massive hurdles to being able to build the amount of housing that is necessary.

To be more specific, I dont think owning a sfh to rent out should be good. But building an apartment complex should be a good investment. Unrestrict building, and tax underutilized land.

Investment certainly feels like a problem. The amount of completely empty homes in my area (coastal ca) is disgusting. There are entire real estate brokers that specialize specifically in investment - these people aren’t even pretending that their clients will use the house, they may never even step foot in it.

Meanwhile economic stratification continues and the other side finds it increasingly difficult to make the down payment.

The issue is that housing should not be an investment but due to rising labor and materials costs and also more restrictive code, they are now an investment.

Get rid of property tax or somebody below a certain income.

This is just wrong. Western economies have largely been hollowed out from productive output in favor of hoarding land and property because there is inelastic demand and increasing prices has become a political goal.

It should be super expensive to own more than one house. This by the way is what China did where Xi Jinping famous said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [1] as he quietly popped the real estate bubble a decade ago.

Increasing house prices are just enriching the already rich and stealing from the next generation. Nothing more. Houses should depreciate in value. They should not be an asset class.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

And when "Just build more" doesn't work because private builders have no incentive to build a million dirt cheap starter homes for a mediocre profit and instead focus on building a few mcmansions?

We have a lot of building going on where I am. It's all for $500k homes. Nobody builds cheap one or two bedroom homes on tiny plots of land because the target consumer is more constrained and therefore far less profitable.

So much of the problems in the US right now is that capitalism optimizes for maximum profit, not any profit. It isn't sufficient in the US business culture to run a business that merely employs a bunch of people and produces things, because in the US, the "business" exists to be an asset class for the extremely wealthy.

So if the free market has no interest in serving people with less money than god, what do we do then?

I don't know why people believe there is a regulatory impediment to building a home outside of a city core. My dad is a contractor and he serves pretty much exclusively rich (gay) tech bros who fled california to increase our cost of living here in maine because nobody else can pay what they pay. His clients that don't fit that mold all inherited a good mid sized business or are well connected families. He does this instead of the plan he had a decade ago to refurbish or build about 10 new homes on a specific plot because it's literally twice as profitable at 1/100th the effort. Instead of working himself into an early grave, he can work 25 hours a week and live as upper middle class with his $100k pickup truck that is owned by his business.

It was pointed out to me recently that immigration crackdown has maybe already started to affect housing prices in DFW since H1B crackdown. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-dallas-h1b-housing-m...

We need immigration because there’s a construction worker shortage. No immigrants = even more expensive to build new homes

There should be social housing in every ZIP code

exactly. it has been shown elsewhere that one problem that makes it difficult for people to escape poverty is that everyone around them is poor too. as long as you live there there is an invisible ceiling in how much you can improve your life as an individual/family. people who were able to move to a better neighborhood found it much easier to improve. mixed housing avoids that poor neighborhood trap.

the same btw, is true for the integration of immigrants.

I don't know why people say Houston is unregulated. Minimum parking requirement is a huge factor in any kind of housing development and Houston has one.

>we have historically low average number of people per house.

I'd like to see the actual statistics method used to calculate that. Saying it's marriages alone just doesn't past the smell test for me. Just because people aren't married doesn't mean they don't live together and the number of unmarried people living together is higher than ever. What makes far more sense is the number of children people have has fallen off a cliff which drastically drops the number of live at home adult children.

Is that true, though? When my parents got married in the 60's in the Netherlands, they had to move in with my grandparents because there was no housing available and eligibility was restricted. It took a few years and a 2nd child before they were eligible to rent an apartment. Perhaps that does not show up in the statistics?

> undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive

Well said. Being told that 'you should be happy without owning' to a party that can't afford to own by another party who is actively scooping up the same resource can feel extremely invalidating.

My personal take is that a lot of support for contemporary political extremism in many countries comes from the fact that a significant portion of population is pissed off and see no realistic chance of the 'settle down and thrive' life, not because they are racist/prejudiced or whatever (although labeling them as such only makes things more extreme)

> Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives.

BLS says housing, transportation, and food are the top 3. Insurance/pensions is #4, but that also includes car and homeowners insurance and retirement contributions.

Over the past 50 years, both transportation and food got cheaper. Moreover, clothing actually used to be one of the top categories, but that’s fallen off completely.

It's not a coincidence that the three sectors you mention are the three most heavily regulated and subject to political intervention in the US, all with schizophrenic policy frameworks that simultaneously restrict supply and subsidize demand.

> Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives.

Definitely true for my household. The mortgage, college for the kids, and health insurance for a family takes up a huge amount. Not to mention the housing expenses like HVAC fixes, trash collection, sewer, utilities, etc.

luxeries also haven't gotten cheap, really - their manufacturing has been outsourced into places which often don't pay decent wages - so it's just out of sight/out of mind.

We're currently living in a time where some of the issues are being hidden by the nature of a global market - it's friggin impossible to make any good analysis with a global market, it has just too many influences and ways to hide criteria...

> I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that

“You have lies, damned lies, and then you have statistics”

Industrialized agriculture drove the cost of food from 50% of a normal person's income hundreds of years ago to like 5% now.

The problem is that after a few centuries of relatively good times, structures have been built up so that the owners of assets can claw back all that income again. They are using housing as the sink for all that wealth, because land can't be industrialized.

They want us to be peasants again.

> Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives

In every developed country two of those are basic human rights, and you get them free even if you’ve never worked simply because you don’t want to.

Every developed country except one, that is.

> Health care, housing, and education

In Europe its only housing, and still proportionally cheaper than what US has, often in higher quality for older homes (bricks / concrete vs cheap creaky wooden houses).

The idea of saving massive amounts for my kids potential university studies is ridiculous to me. Same for any health issue. I mean any health issue as long as I can work, and then social state takes over (that is not ideal but at point nothing is).

This is also how happiness can be defined - lack of (much shorter list of) constant worries and pressures to deliver, sustain etc.

>this is all downstream of structural incentives

You are mostly right and the structural incentives are more related at root to unsustainable national debt than any legislative choice (unless that's what you were referring to)

Or we just wait for automation and robotics to make building housing much cheaper and the free market system to fix things - which 5 years ago I assumed was too far out, but with all the advances in the sector, seems like we might get significantly cheaper building costs within the next 10 years or so.

You can have these things without owning a house.

Community is IMO easier in apartments, the higher density means there’s a bigger pool of folks you might click with.

Community gathering spots are more prevalent as well: pools, playgrounds, green spaces, etc are common amenities. Especially if you get a dog, you will meet lots of people.

Of course it depends on which complex you live in. If I move I will miss my apartment and its community. I won’t miss my window aircon though, central air would be awesome.

> 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete.

This isn't really how the transition to agriculture worked. Historically agricultural elites captured lands with conscripted armies and forced people to farm. There are plenty of examples where central authority collapsed and the archeological evidence shows us that people largely stopped farming.

Pastoral nomadic animal husbandry made agricultural societies obsolete.

Here's a follow-up video by Ben Felix posted more recently about the case for home ownership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16eA5ebWMQQ

In the end, home ownership is more based around the kind of life you want to live than costs/benefits of the house as an asset. As a Canadian I see that many of my friends would choose to pay a lot more each month on the principle of a mortgage than they would ever save in a registered account.

> home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness

N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder".

The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve lived in the city my whole life and have seen rents rise. That’s been extremely frustrating for me because I’ve been at the mercy of market trends and have worried about what would happen if, at some point, I didn’t earn as much anymore, or if rents rose so much that they became too expensive even for me. What would I do then? The worry that, despite a relatively good income, I might be at risk of poverty in old age because I have to hand over a good portion of my take-home pay to a landlord month after month is very frustrating in the long run.

A year ago, my partner and I bought a small house a short distance (40 minutes by car) from the city, and I moved into a much smaller, cheaper, and less central apartment in the city. I still spend a large part of my time in the city, but I’m also at the house regularly, especially on weekends. I’ve been much more relaxed ever since, because I know that I can give the city’s rental market the middle finger at any time and retreat to our house.

Then come the property taxes

The arts are often the first step towards gentrification. The artists move in for the cheap rent, then the rest see all the arts and think "I want to live there!" Then pretty soon the artists can't afford it any more and move somewhere else.

CPI disagrees.

Oh, thank god, TVs are less expensive.

;-)

Land is finite but not meaningfully so at this point. If my early morning napkin math is right, we could give every person on earth about 6.4 acres of land.

Land where people want to live is scarce. Obviously a variety of factors but one of them is that land is bifurcating the way income is. Small amounts are growing in value rapidly and the rest is declining (or growing more slowly). Urban property is skyrocketing, rural property in coal country is struggling.

Land as a finite resource only affects first tier real estate market markets. You can see this vividly in China where there's a housing glut on aggregate, but not in first tier cities.

That's too simplistic. The best (and maybe even easiest) locations and local population evolve over time as well. Land can be developed in different ways, allowing for different density. Different people buy property for different reasons, which affects its value.

The early 2010s, the age of financial bailouts, Occupy Wall Street, and two "forever" wars.

No one ever thinks they're living through a Golden Age.

See ya, I'm time-traveling back to the 70's, ha ha.

Singapore is also a city state and has a land and housing policy that can't be easily replicated elsewhere. Tell Americans they will be shoved into government built high rises with racial quota and see what happens.

Finland is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world and has a home ownership rate comparable to the US. Denmark ranks 3rd and has a slightly lower home ownership rate than the US. Oh, and Singapore ranks 36th[1], while the US is 23rd[2].

So you're probably wrong on all points here.

[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/SGP

[2] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/USA

I'm curious what people are quibbling with here? Romania has the world's highest rate of home ownership at 96% and only ranks as 34th in happiness. Or maybe Kazakhstan but I can't verify the data on that, and it's right beside Romania in happiness. Switzerland has the world's 4th lowest rate of home ownership and ranks 10th happiest. It seems like from a data perspective there is no empirical support for the idea that home ownership directly correlates to societal happiness.

Also if you buy lots of cheap junk for your apartment and then have to move, you will not be happy.

A lot of that cheap junk is clothing and food, which now both make up a much lower percentage of total income than they did 100 years ago.

His point appears to be that each person should only look after their own interests?

Is that your intent in posting it?

Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine.

There are a lot of factors. Some things are worse than the past. However other things are better. There is no universal correct weighting of these different factors.

In general I think that nobody would be willing to go far back in time. You don't need YouTube, but would you want to live without it? How about electric lights? Safe drinking water? Flush toilets?

> Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...

I'm pretty sure "stuff" in this context is mostly manufactured goods, and those have fallen in absolute price. Examples abound in the tech sector: even adjusted for inflation, a MacBook Neo is the cheapest Mac ever released, and so on...

Durable goods have deflated compared to wages while health care, housing, and education soared. If you are given the job of spinning this (or take it upon yourself in a bid for access), focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter is how you do it. "Think of the iPhones! Never mind that rent in a mid-rate city is 1 iPhone and 2 big screen TVs every month!"

What is the time period for you numbers?

If you live in a place which is used only for vacation homes, or worse, only as investment objects, you know the value of owner occupancy.

Non-occupants contribute very little to the actual value of a place - they don't work here, they don't buy here. But they capture much of the value of other people trying to make the place a pleasant place to live, though rising real estate values.

The theory behind it is that 1) economic growth generally accrues to land values so distributing land ownership is one way to distribute wealth and 2) people generally treat the things they own better than the things they rent or consume.

Incentivizing ownership is more closely aligned with objective (1) while owner-occupancy is more closely aligned with objective (2).

These don't work in the presence of capital's outsized returns though, which allows people who (for whatever reason) have access to more capital to recursively seize more of the growth in land values from objective (1) and therefore price out objective (2).

> Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric?

Culturally, in many countries it helps with household formation (coupling, starting families), which, in an age of low birth rates, can be useful.

A key difference is illustrated in TFA. To maximize fraction of people owning a home, you dislike people renting or living with a homeowner. A spouse that marries a homeowner, for example. It would be "better" if they broke up and owned their own separate homes. Or perhaps they could buy two homes, one for each. Or they could by two homes and rent a third to actually live in - same metric value.

To maximize fraction of homes with their owner living inside, you focus on the ownership _and_ the lifestyle choice. A family living together is the best use of land in this case. A family renting a side room to a college kid is still the best use of land. If every home were lived in by its owner, you could still have 90% of your population renting and not building generational wealth.

More importantly, nobody cares about the people where renting is their ideal condition (at least for now - in different situations different ways of living are ideal). There should be nothing wrong with renting. Owning your own should be a worse choice if you will live there for less than 5-10 years. Owning a home should be only slightly better if you will live there for more than 10 years - not enough better to make up the hassles of owning.

If you rent make sure you vote. Make sure you have an informed vote, all too often cities will put rules on rental units that make renting worse for you. (bad tenants and bad landlords exist - good tenants and good landlords need protection from the former). Likewise while rent obeys supply and demand, when property taxes go up that factors into supply and will make rent go up indirectly - is it worth it? (I cannot answer the later question - the more important consideration is make sure the taxes are similar for rental and owned units otherwise you are a renter are harmed)

You might want to maximize owner occupancy because you care about the poor homes who don't have local owners - as an owner living in the home might be better incentivized to take care of it and provide decent living conditions, for example.

Allowing people access fairly illiquid and predictable housing allows and incentivizes them to prioritize things on longer timelines which is good for society.

I think that single family homes as a speculative asset needs to be done away with. If all this energy and investment went to purchasing, say, agricultural land, then more "little" people could own that and protect against institutional investors. Small landlords were only good because they kept institutional investors away, but now that they can't purchase more homes, the small real estate investor's money would be better used to hedge against market capture in the next thing up the hierarchy of needs, i.e. food. If we keep walking this back, then eventually we can prevent assholes from speculating on basic needs.

Are you aware that you are linking to TFA of this exact hackernews post?

Point taken. But surely there must be a way to account for that. Can we assume if the net asset value of the individual is greater than the value of the house by some percentage? Then they are owners instead of renters.

Of course not, but many do - it generally doesn't make sense to buy if you won't stay for a longer period of time (used to be ~7 years, not sure if that's shifted) due to closing costs, interest on loans, etc.

Why is ownership a goal? Housing is the goal.

50% is anything but mediocre.

> If both parents work they're also easily spending roughly 30+ grand a year on daycare alone.

Depends on how old the kids are, because at least in most cases, daycare costs are for a very short period of time compared to the the overall life of the child. And the average in most states is wildly all over the place.

We absolutely should be focused on free childcare, or ideally ways that parents don't need childcare to begin with, but I don't think that has a lot to do with household income. Hell, at that point, why as well talk about transportation costs, as it's different in a single household vs a two parent two kid household, and different still depending on where you live.

Renting isn't 'good' though in many metrics. Ownership is, and that's what the push should be for, rather than promoting basically a monthly subscription to have a roof over your head.

If houses are capital, renting can never be just as good without de-incentivizing renting via legislation, which in reality will result in a massive rental shortfall, since nobody is going to maintain rental property when they could just invest their money in another asset.

Why? It’s a position of less security and stability