Reminds me when I moved to boston for a job as a young grad. Found a room available for rent on craigslist for $400 in a 2 floor apartment. Half way through living there, someone bought the vacant apartment downstairs and turns out the room I was staying in was owned by the downstairs people so I had to change rooms.

I think there's always a way to make these moves work. You just need to take a risk and be ready to suffer.

Easy fix, the department of defense has been doing it for years in Southwest DC.

Just build corporate housing.

Then we can have little Amazon towns where all your needs are met and everyone lives in perfect harmony in downtown San Fransisco.

Along the same lines, you are buying a place. A place that you own and can do whatever you like with. I spent twenty years renting and twenty years of feeling like you can’t hang a picture on the wall, paint a room, upgrade an appliance, or really do anything to improve your surroundings, tends to get tiring.

> Buying a house can be an investment, but it's also buying a place to live.

I'm a strong proponent of both owning and renting, and each has tradeoffs vs. the other. I've moved between renting and home ownership a couple times, and I appreciate the customizability of ownership along with the very real financial advantages.

On the other side, I've also enjoyed "freedom" of renting, where I didn't have to spend any additional time, energy, or money on maintenance tasks. In my HCOL part of the country, I could also afford the rent to live "downtown" when owning anything remotely similar was out of the question.

Your "also a place to live" line is fantastically underrated. When the housing market was flat or declining, I'd always get annoyed when people said something like "I've owned this house for 5 years, but now it's worth $20k less than when I bought it!". That also means if they sold it right now at that $20k "loss" then they effectively paid $333/month plus upkeep to live somewhere for 5 years!

That isn't a trap if we're talking about how other people perceive things. You might want a place to live, but the houses are all owned by people who want investments, so for the purpose of explaining the housing market, they're investments.

No constant anxiety that you’re going to be serially priced out of your own home or that the landlord is going to decide they’re giving the apartment to their nephew or something is worth quite a lot.

I’m not against renting but the rate at which prices are rising in many areas is unbelievable and the inherent instability it brings frankly sucks. It makes renewal time every year needlessly stressful.

If prices were more stable over long periods and one could more easily secure assurance that the owner isn’t going to rugpull them so one could only move every decade or so at most frequent that’d be easier to deal with.

Home ownership comes with costs, too. There's maintenance, taxes, etc.

It can also be a prison, as many people who locked in at low interest rates are learning. If they move, a lot of them will have to reset their mortgage rates and end up paying a lot more. This has trapped people into housing that is substandard for their living situations (growing families, moving for career opportunities, etc).

Renting can be perfectly fine for society, though the explicit tax benefits in the USA usually tilt in favour of home ownership. But a lot of very wealthy countries are majority renters, including Switzerland (where the home ownership rate is in the 30-40% range). This gives the Swiss a huge leg up on lifestyle flexibility and the majority of their wealth isn't tied up in a single asset.

I'm not trying to shit on owning a place, but ideally there should be nothing wrong with renting (assuming a competitive market where rental units can be built and aren't zoned out due to restrictions, etc).

you are falling into the trap of thinking of a house as a maintenance-free place to live

I agree with this. The same goes for subscription cars. Default on the monthly payments and they take it away.

If you purchased a rust bucket of a car, you own it and if it all goes south you still have a roof over your head.

Right. This would make it possible and reasonable if you could find a house that is enough, such that you can live in it, expect a reasonably good experience in it for the life of your time in it, and that that mortgage payment, plus all maintenance, insurance, tax, etc. is reasonably comparable to an equivalent rental. Depending on where you are, this is not always the case. Or you need to buy a small place at current rates and prices to make it at all comparable.

You have to decide what "enough" is, and that's variable depending on your expected standard of living, etc. I am personally currently lucky enough to be in a good rental situation, which colors my view.

Having a landlord that will fix problems and eat incidental appliance/roof/major expenses is a form of insurance paid as rental.

Exactly- owning one home is actually the neutral position. Renters are persistently taking a short position on real estate and landlords/multiple owners are effectively long.

Keep in mind though that by entering into a 20% down mortgage you are effectively levered up 5x against your local real estate market. So it’s not like you’re totally reducing your risk. Luckily for homeowners, home prices only go up since the GFC so this leverage seems like a good position to be in.

I agree.

The mortgage was to allow people to eventually OWN THE PROPERTY, not a leveraged investment.

It's an interesting development that some (most?) regular people have forgotten that there is a 3rd option, not just rent or loan. You can actually OWN the thing and pay only property tax on it.

> My advice to any young'un thinking they can wait out the market: you can't, buy whatever you can afford as soon as you can and watch inflation reduce that painful monthly outgoing to something more manageable over time.

I don't think that is quite right. Buy whatever you can afford as soon as life puts you in a position where you can reasonably expect to live in the same place for at least 7 years. You will never perfectly know your future, but predicting 7 years generally isn't too hard, and if you are wrong it is probably close enough to 7 years that you are okay.

My first house I had to sell after 10 years (I got a job in a new city) and I lost money on the sale despite the 10 years, but that is an outlier. Most people will see enough value appreciation in less years as to not be out too much if they have to move. 7 is just a good compromise for most people.

Don't forget when buying a house that you have to pay for maintenance. Make sure you can afford this somehow. If you have friends/family that can help with that work that can save a ton of money over if you have to hire someone.

Mathematics agrees with you, there are in fact infinitely many numbers.

Physics and reality do not. Once the number gets big enough it loses all practical value. Humans are not really built to reason about very large numbers. At some point you reach Zimbabwean inflation and your currency loses all value because everyone is paid in the trillions. Then you reset your currency back to lower numbers because that's what humans and their systems can handle.

So, no, the number cannot always go up. There is a practical ceiling beyond which numbers lose meaning and value.

Generally people are indexing the numbers always go up to inflation. Which should be different, but so far numbers still go up anyway.

Not all numbers. Some numbers have certainly gone down. Your home might be one of them. So might really bad stock pick too.

I can, rent in cheap cost of living location. Why pay 600k+ usd to purchase in m-hcol when instead can live abroad during retirement and pay 1k/month and use the remaining for better living or health care or whatnot?

Agree here. But I'm a doomer/collapsenik - so, the same future coming for "retirement" is the same future coming for "house always appreciates in value". Maybe 1990 -> 2020 was an okay 30 year period, 2026 -> 2056 sure won't be.

In the UK at least there’s significant tax advantages to home ownership compared to renting.

Easily 30-50% of the money you pay in rent is immediately burned in tax/letting agent fees that don’t happen to a homeowner who “is their own landlord”. Additionally there’s no capital gains tax on one’s primary home.

Even if house prices stay flat it’s usually still better to own if rental yields in your area are higher than 5%.

A house is a good hedge against inflation - my payments stay the same for 30 years of inflation, then go to zero (I still have taxes and maintenance so this is wrong - but it is close enough to true for discussion). Meanwhile rent is expected to go up with inflation. The longer you live in a house the better an investment it is.

Sounds like it also puts the incentives in the right place. Why don't you keep voting out the government until it builds enough houses?

you are correct that we need to increase supply, and socialized housing creates more supply. great idea

All true, but there is evidence that rent increases for existing tenants lag behind market increases.