America’s Fastest-Growing Loan Category Has Eerie Echoes of Subprime Crisis

Both of those definitions are wrongly stated, and that's why you're producing this wrong belief about primary residences.

An an economic sense, an investment is an allocation of capital. Certainly consumer purchases of durable goods are not investments. The most common type of capital to invest is money, but other types might apply. By investing, one becomes the beneficiary of some of the means of production. Real estate is a perfect example. Real estate is always an economic investment, whether one then consumes the output or not. Also, by the way, many investments in this sense are consumable, usually with long rates of depreciation. That applies to a CNC machine, it applies to a fleet of productive vehicles, and it applies to buildings, including primary residences. If the fact that a house degrades with use makes it not-an-investment, you argue yourself into an obviously-silly corner.

Your line about "it's a bad financial one" is almost too foolish to touch. A bad financial investment is still an investment. Telling people that a bad investment is not an investment is not communicating, it's posturing. Financially, if you buy a candy bar, and its value drops, it was still an investment (a poor one).

If you want to make the claim that housing is a poorly-chosen investment, that's a different claim. Although, without knowing more about the life circumstances of the would-be investor, a fairly preposterous one, since it's clearly a good investment for many people, in practice.

> (or not, doesn't matter)

heh. indeed.

I agree with the "didn't I say that?"s, you just appeared to contradict it on later in the respective sentences.

Of course appreciation (assuming it happens) is not production. The good that a home produces is housing. That's why it's an allocation of capital to a means of production. That's why, economically, it's an investment. There's no way around that. The claim that something is economically an investment is completely disconnected from resale value; it's connected to productive capacity.

And you appear to have backed off on the claim that it's not a financial investment, you just think it's a poor one. I disagree, but I think your position on this is, while mistaken, not madness.

I think that, given demographic trends, both in terms of population growth, and in terms of ongoing trends in urbanization, we should expect that the long-term trend of real estate appreciating at 1-2% more than inflation should continue. That alone should defuse your claim that it's an obviously-bad investment (i.e. it's a good hedge against inflation, better than traditional anti-inflation hedges like gold). Whether it's a good investment depends on other factors, like how far you leverage, how easily you can weather things like 2008, how diversified you want your portfolio, how much tax advantage you get from owning your primary residence, how much it would cost in your market to rent an equivalent home, whether it's even possible to rent the home you want, etc etc etc. But it should be credibly on the table for every investor. And you cite 2008... but of the homeowners that I personally know, who were long real estate in 2008, with whom I've discussed the issue (perhaps a dozen), literally zero of them are sad that they were long in 2008 (except of course that if they'd had a crystal ball, some of them would have done differently, right after buying lottery tickets). So what is it you want me to see about the 2008 housing crisis?