> I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless.

HELOCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit ) exist to solve the problem of cash being locked up in your house. You can take a line of credit using the property as collateral or other purchases.

> I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless.

Are you using some peculiar definition of "homeless" as someone who does not own real estate, like in Elon Musk had been homeless when he sold his California houses?

This take is actively destructive. We need to let people CHOOSE to live WHERE they want to live - and let people who buy land CHOOSE to build housing for demand they perceive. That's it. That's the problem and the solution. It should be unconstitutional to limit housing production arbitrarily.

Agree, but I think you mean NYC of the West, not East.

As soon as FAANG starts hiring people in Utah, Arkansas and Minnesota for the same roles at the same wages as they hire in the Bay, then people will move. As soon as VCs start funding founders in Boise, Kansas City and Chattanooga, then people will move.

Until then, maybe we work to improve the places where most of us are required to live by our jobs. (And yes, in parallel we can work to reduce the employer-mandated dependence on those areas).

>Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country

This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are.

The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely.

We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.

> I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.

Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution:

Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters.

Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!

I bring it up with some people.

To do this you need to either accept:

- the area becomes an enclave for the wealthy with a high unhoused population, where most youth have to move away. People say they don't want this, I’m not sure they are being honest.

- the government regulates internal migration. You need a permit to move from the Midwest to California.

People don't bring it up because it requires doing things most understand to not be options. 1 - how would you stop people from moving to SF if they choose 2 - it stops dynamism for the city. You are here because you were already here is the only requisite.

The prices going up is the market creating the incentive for less people to not move to SF and old guard to stay. You already have that. You are not going to bring down prices while limiting people without legislation that goes into dangerous territory of limiting who can live in one of Americas most dynamic cities.

Presently high housing prices are causing this; a lot more people would be living in SF today if there was more supply, which is equivalent to the high prices having kicked people out.

Do you have any policies in mind that could reduce the population without pricing people out? Maybe a Hukou system, or a right-to-reside lottery?

If you prefer to live in a low density exurb, you have many options for affordable housing, there's just a lack of good paying jobs and services in those areas.

Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.

> This is patently false.

I think what they're trying to say is that housing being a good investment long-term is fundamentally incompatible with housing being affordable, and society should choose the latter. Within a given area, home values can only rise so much before:

1. New construction is permitted, thus increasing supply and lowering home values

2. Growth plateaus because demand shrinks—no one can afford homes or residents move away because property taxes become too financially burdensome

This isn't the case with all investments, or at least the growth can be sustained for much longer with other investments. A successfully run company can grow for decades before the exponential becomes unsustainable. When growth stalls, it's a lot easier to sell the stock and buy another than it is to sell one's home and move to another area.

> Moreover most home buyers do not view them as a cash flow generating asset - it’s literally their home.

I don't think this is true. Western governments have subsidized homeownership so much precisely because it's marketed as an easy way to build generational wealth. I don't think most homebuyers view their home as primarily an investment, but growth potential is definitely considered by most during the homebuying process, and homeowners as a voting block often vehemently oppose development because their investments are so precious to them.

Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.