Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both also make the assumption that owning a house is good. Renting should be just as good.
Why? It’s a position of less security and stability
Renting is significantly less risky from a financial standpoint.
New US homeownership measure puts people first
81–90 of 394 posts
Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first
#82There was a youtube video sometime ago that argued about how life has vastly improved in every single aspect (with numbers about how 'stuff' has gotten universally more affordable), only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income and how that proves we have a better quality of life because of that. It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately aff…
Many forms of media and social pressure point to owning your own home as a measure of personal success. It probably is. If it wasn't, rich people wouldn't buy so many. Plus it's harder to kick you out of a place you own than a place you rent.
Additionally, buying a house is probably the easiest way to build some kind of generational wealth. It's easy to see this as yet another way the older generation is pulling up the ladder behind them.
Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Singapore is surveyed as either the happiest or second-happiest country in Asia (IIRC), with at one point a >95% homeownership rate due to government policy (although I believe that's now closer to 90%, in part due to foreign immigration?). It seems self-evident that having a home is somewhere on the order of 1000000x more important than being able to buy lots of cheap junk that barely matters.
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.
What's the point of being able to spend less on cheap junk if the surplus is eaten up and outspent by important things that inflated during that timespan?
Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first
#84I find it hard to trust economic narratives when so many metrics cited upon further inspection do not really measure what they are implied to measure.
Or maybe we measure what is easiest to measure, not what is best.
I see this everywhere, though. Jobs data is really job openings not actual hires. Unemployment data is really paperwork filing not people out of work or retiring early. And now home ownership is really "count everyone in the home if the owner resides there".
Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first
#85There was a youtube video sometime ago that argued about how life has vastly improved in every single aspect (with numbers about how 'stuff' has gotten universally more affordable), only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income and how that proves we have a better quality of life because of that. It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately aff…
Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative ch…
> 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)
Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If however you care about the housing development decisions that will incentivise owner occupancy 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? Basically right now we measure "what fraction of homes are occupied by an owner" and not "what fraction of people live in their o…
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.
So long as the percentage of people who live in a home they own is high, there's not a great reason to care about owner occupancy.
You're just using it as a proxy for people owning homes. It's not a given that the two numbers are always opposed.
Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first
#87There was a youtube video sometime ago that argued about how life has vastly improved in every single aspect (with numbers about how 'stuff' has gotten universally more affordable), only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income and how that proves we have a better quality of life because of that. It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately aff…
I love to see metrics that evolve over time. Land is a finite resources, as such it inevitably trends up as the best and easiest locations are consumed. So I think the correlation here has to be understood from that baseline.
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.
Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first
#88There was a youtube video sometime ago that argued about how life has vastly improved in every single aspect (with numbers about how 'stuff' has gotten universally more affordable), only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income and how that proves we have a better quality of life because of that. It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately aff…
Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative ch…
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.
Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
What crack was the YTber on? Income has only raised ~15% (on average), while inflation has been at 30%... meanwhile in the past century, money has lost 96% of its value... Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...
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!"
It’s true there’s a spin in that direction. But I think there’s also a tendency to take things for granted in the other direction because they have become so cheap. Food and clothing used to make up significant line items for ordinary people. I remember in the 1990s seeing ads for discount cereal (“it comes in a bag on the bottom shelf but it’s just as good as the branded stuff!”). When was the last time you saw a commercial like that?
A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted. In 1970, which was when boomers were about the same age as Gen Z is today, only a third of americans had air conditioning. Today it’s almost 90%—basically only the people in very temperate climates don’t have it.
Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative ch…
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.
The cost of housing mostly isn't in the building. If it was, we'd just build smaller and have houses. But you can't because the land costs too much.