America’s Magical Thinking About Housing: The city of Austin built a lot of homes. Now rent is falling, and some people seem to think that’s a bad thing
America’s Magical Thinking About Housing: The city of Austin built a lot of homes. Now rent is falling, and some people seem to think that’s a bad thing
The city of Austin built a lot of homes. Now rent is falling, and some people seem to think that’s a bad thing.
If homeownership is best understood as an investment, like equities, we should root for prices to go up
A home is where you live. Too many people believe homes are investments which has driven the cost up.
In the 80-90s, everyone started buying houses as investments.
A home is an investment because it has value like nothing else.... everyone wants to love somewhere right?
That said, the market for houses that can be homes to people is just going crazy. More houses means people can afford a place to live. It should be a market because only then can money be extracted from people's homes to make the house better or to build new homes.
I used to rent a house to another family and all my weekends were about fixing some shit. I got tired of that. Basically I was just passing the money between the people who wanted to live there with free maintenance. I was doing the maintenance for free for the real owner, the bank complex. So fuck that. I got out of that. The market makes landlords, not the other way around. My family used to rent from a landlord and it was always a shitty day every beginning of the month. Being out of that shit equation feels much better. But I can only afford to because I have a job that pays the bills. So rent incomes must be translated into other sources of income so that others can drop the market and let the price freefall. If the price fireballs, then the big Chinese companies and other big landlords will loose money and exit the market. Those landlords that are mostly there for a monthly profit are what sucks. There will always be people who just want to rent because they can't take care of a house themselves. That's something no one can fix, and bless their hearts for living in bliss. Finally, though, a house is just another thing to "own". You won't take it past your grave. But unlike a car, you might really really want to own a house outright before you pass away because in the last few years of your useful life you will be fooled into retirement.... retirement is when you are squeezed for all you still got by inflation. This happens on every generation. That's why you retire from a rich area and move to a poor area so your money can stretch while it drops to inflation.
Paywall.
Take a page from our friends at hacker news and post the archived link. That way we can all enjoy it!
Thank you for adding this link.
I really enjoy how whenever I find a paywalled article, I can usually head to the comments and find someone like you helping out. This also means that when I find that no-one has added an unblocked link yet, there is an organic sense of it being "my turn" to help out, like I'm taking out the bins in a shared house. I like having a space where I don't mind doing chores, and the key to that is feeling like the load is shared
A lot of people are incapable of logical thought and reason. Or capable but choose not to use it. Whether because they believe the bullshit that is sold to them via politics and media or other foolishness.
Silly article writer! Landlords aren't people.
This is a fantastic article, speaking as an Austinite, but I think it slightly misses the point. The only people who think falling rent prices are a bad a thing are the people who wrote the cited articles who are fishing for clicks, like the WSJ, as well as the few people making money from rent. There isn't a single goddamn real person in this town who thinks rents falling by an average of $100 after rising $400 over the past three years is a bad thing.
A totally separate problem in this article is how they diametrically oppose housing as a place to live vs an investment vehicle, and their criticism of this portion of the 2020 Democratic Party platform is totally unfounded. The reality of a mortgage is that your home could appreciate 0% over 30 years, but as long as you pay you will continue to build equity. If you buy a house for $300K, and it never appreciates, and you eventually pay it off, you still have a $300K investment to help you in your old age and/or leave to your children.
That equity is what constitutes generational wealth, and building that wealth does not require rising property values. Rising property values are a lagniappe.
The general public certainly has a skewed perspective about how housing supply and demand affects prices, though