there is a fundamental contradiction between "home as affordable shelter" and "homes as appreciating assets." in order for the latter to be true, prices must go continually up, which requires some combo of supply restrictions & subsidies, and also tends to produce this: - ThreadSky

ryanlcooper.com • 1 day ago

there is a fundamental contradiction between "home as affordable shelter" and "homes as appreciating assets." in order for the latter to be true, prices must go continually up, which requires some combo of supply restrictions & subsidies, and also tends to produce this:

Reposted from Catherine Rampell

Median age of homebuyers just hit a new record high of 56
(Via Torsten Slok)

Comments

proudanselmo.bsky.social•1 day ago

As an asset that appreciates faster than inflation.

propcazhpm.bsky.social•1 day ago

And homelessness.

boomies-n-zoomies.bsky.social•23 hours ago

Also, “home as appreciating asset” and “rising median home buyer age” runs into some pretty obvious issues sooner rather than later.

robpfleming.bsky.social•1 day ago

Affordable shelter point still holds relative to rents (I.e. it is de facto rent control for those with enough to put down a deposit)

ryanlcooper.com•1 day ago

yeah the 30 year mortgage is basically that

brandonjitsu.bsky.social•21 hours ago

It's probably because of avocado toast

lukehoekstra.bsky.social•23 hours ago

cutting the FHA in half will definitely not help

newcartographer.bsky.social•1 day ago

No no no, the house the I want to BUY has to be affordable, not the house I want to SELL. Apples and oranges.

tomoh.bsky.social•23 hours ago

IMO, as a home-owning adult, ideally homes would not be investment vehicles or nest eggs. We should have a better welfare state so homes wouldn't be relied upon as speculative assets and then our land use and urban design wouldn't be distorted by catering to structures for single families.

gauaren.bsky.social•23 hours ago

Seems to me that housing is like a third rail of sorts. Lack of supply makes people nazi, so you gotta fix that, but increasing supply lowers value, which also drives people nazi. So how do you fix that? Housing in the US seems like a suicide pact to me

ryanlcooper.com•23 hours ago

I think a fair compromise would be to stabilize values at a median price of, I dunno, $300k, with a national social housing program. people can get back what they paid in but no more

conjurial.bsky.social•22 hours ago

If prices grow at the general rate of inflation, you can still lever that up to a much higher return with a mortgage.

This isn’t a perpetual motion machine bc 30-year mortgages at those rates require enormous implicit public subsidies.

The whole thing is just a way to obscure the subsidy

conjurial.bsky.social•22 hours ago

Because Americans don’t like to think of themselves as getting a handout from the government when they buy a house to “build generational wealth”

snidely1459.bsky.social•22 hours ago

I told one of my right wing high school friends that he was on welfare because he has a mortgage and 3 kids. He went nuts. "Tax breaks are different". No they're not.

gauaren.bsky.social•22 hours ago

homeowners should stop mooching off the federal government and invest in the stock market like true by-their-bootstraps Americans smh (jk)

huntthesnark.bsky.social•23 hours ago

Except almost the entire municipal tax base is property taxes, which under such a scheme becomes basically steady-state, and you wind up in some version of a California Prop 13 situation. The incentives of homeowners and local officials are all aligned with "number go up."

huntthesnark.bsky.social•23 hours ago

You also wind up in a "tragedy of the commons" situation where almost any maintenance or improvement to the home is a pure loss.

Something like a social housing -> CoOp conversion model like you see in places in NYC is interesting, but it's subsidy by another name.

gauaren.bsky.social•23 hours ago

definitely fair, but then people would need to get off the mindset of the real estate nest egg and I don’t know, start investing or something. Real estate brain runs too deep

airshipchronos.bsky.social•20 hours ago

Well you see they aren't producing any more land so it's the safest investment...

grungehamster.bsky.social•23 hours ago

Some of this is accounted for with the median age in the US going up by approximately 9 years over the course of that chart (hey Baby Boomers), but 100% it is being fueled by policies intended to help enrich existing homeowners/tax base at the cost of new entrants.

jacobmosk.bsky.social•20 hours ago

There's a sweet spot of housing going up 2-3% in line with inflation and wages going up more than that, but obviously that's never been close to happening

ryanlcooper.com•18 hours ago

it kinda happened in the postwar boom but private market institutions are just structurally incapable of doing it. instead you get boom/bust dynamics

gibbers.bsky.social•1 day ago

land value tax would fix this, etc, etc

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