“Building wealth through real estate” should not be possible, and it’s half the reason we’re in this mess: people treating their homes as a store of wealth and blocking new construction to protect the value of their investment has locked young people out of the housing market. Hence all the gambling. What you should be hoping is that YIMBY policies carry the day in the end and “building wealth through real estate” is eliminated as a thing.

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throwitaway222 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Building wealth through real estate should not be possible

I am sympathetic to this argument, but there are problems. How do you get homes built if you make this change?

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myrmidon 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

By people paying for houses they actually want to live in?

Real estate as "investment" is not helping anything here; it hurts home availability, first because prospective homeowners have to compete with capital that just wants to use those as store of value/for rentseeking (driving up demand/prices) and secondly because this creates incentives against building more houses (because that hurts those real estate "investors").

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Analemma_ 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Construction companies can still turn a profit building and selling them. The idea is that houses should be depreciating assets, like cars. If houses are appreciating in value it means you're not building enough of them.

	▲	nradov 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Most houses do depreciate, or they require frequent expenses just to maintain their value which amounts to the same thing. There are occasionally exceptions to this rule in times of rapid construction price inflation but that's rare. It's the land under the house that typically appreciates. Land is unlikely to depreciate unless the broader regional economy declines.
	▲	s1artibartfast 19 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		or that the cost to build them is going up.