<story><title>A global house-price slump is coming?</title><url>https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/10/20/a-global-house-price-slump-is-coming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kodah</author><text>&amp;gt; The bad news is that we decided that owning a house is a retirement plan instead of giving people proper retirement plans.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve pondered on this a lot. Houses have been treated as &amp;quot;nest-eggs&amp;quot;, which is really a fancy term for a fallback plan, for quite some time. The housing market really only got out of control after the 80&amp;#x27;s which coincides with when mortgage packages started getting sold on the stock market. To me, that, city zoning, corporate SFH buying, and state governments that have economic policies that embrace&amp;#x2F;grow inflation seem to be the &lt;i&gt;actual&lt;/i&gt; problem.&lt;p&gt;I still think it&amp;#x27;s worth while to have house equity as a way to securely store money, but the government has to protect the housing market conservatively to make that work. Just like anything else the market is a system of incentives.</text></item><item><author>pessimizer</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s sickening that this is always marketed as bad news, even though we&amp;#x27;ve been in a bubble for the past 20 years. The bad news is that we decided that owning a house is a retirement plan instead of giving people proper retirement plans. Somehow every non-homeowner has to be a policy slave to the passive income of some wealthy person. And we defend it by claiming that old people who are worth enough money not to work are not wealthy, as if we care about old people. We only care about old people as model &amp;quot;savers&amp;quot; who can be used to morally justify policies that directly and overwhelmingly benefit the very wealthy to the obscenely wealthy.&lt;p&gt;And also, there&amp;#x27;s a problem with revolving credit (i.e. a 2-year mortgage), such as Australia or Britain, or anything that is floating along with some interest rate. But these are a) intentional problems that the people making the loans hope will make them rich, and b) problems with pricing, because people are expected to take decades longer to pay off a house than it would take for them to build it alone with their own hands in their spare time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tiktaalik</author><text>A big problem is that homeowners understand that for the value of their &amp;quot;nest-egg&amp;quot; to appreciate, this implicitly relies on housing scarcity, and this influences the outcome of elections, which influences the outcome of government housing policy.&lt;p&gt;As home valuations become more important and critical to the wellbeing of the &amp;quot;middle class&amp;quot;, any policy that would even indirectly hinder valuations comes under great criticism.&lt;p&gt;There were a number of issues in my recent municipal council election, but I cannot help but notice that the candidates suggesting to build rental housing everywhere, which would have empowered renters and hurt homeowning minor landlords that benefit from high rents, lost, and those that won suggested the status quo that would protect detached home areas, with their main housing policy suggestion being around faster renovation permitting, useful of course for those minor home owning landlords wanting to create a secondary suite to get a renter to pay off their massive mortgages.</text></comment>
<story><title>A global house-price slump is coming?</title><url>https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/10/20/a-global-house-price-slump-is-coming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kodah</author><text>&amp;gt; The bad news is that we decided that owning a house is a retirement plan instead of giving people proper retirement plans.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve pondered on this a lot. Houses have been treated as &amp;quot;nest-eggs&amp;quot;, which is really a fancy term for a fallback plan, for quite some time. The housing market really only got out of control after the 80&amp;#x27;s which coincides with when mortgage packages started getting sold on the stock market. To me, that, city zoning, corporate SFH buying, and state governments that have economic policies that embrace&amp;#x2F;grow inflation seem to be the &lt;i&gt;actual&lt;/i&gt; problem.&lt;p&gt;I still think it&amp;#x27;s worth while to have house equity as a way to securely store money, but the government has to protect the housing market conservatively to make that work. Just like anything else the market is a system of incentives.</text></item><item><author>pessimizer</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s sickening that this is always marketed as bad news, even though we&amp;#x27;ve been in a bubble for the past 20 years. The bad news is that we decided that owning a house is a retirement plan instead of giving people proper retirement plans. Somehow every non-homeowner has to be a policy slave to the passive income of some wealthy person. And we defend it by claiming that old people who are worth enough money not to work are not wealthy, as if we care about old people. We only care about old people as model &amp;quot;savers&amp;quot; who can be used to morally justify policies that directly and overwhelmingly benefit the very wealthy to the obscenely wealthy.&lt;p&gt;And also, there&amp;#x27;s a problem with revolving credit (i.e. a 2-year mortgage), such as Australia or Britain, or anything that is floating along with some interest rate. But these are a) intentional problems that the people making the loans hope will make them rich, and b) problems with pricing, because people are expected to take decades longer to pay off a house than it would take for them to build it alone with their own hands in their spare time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NegativeLatency</author><text>Perhaps also single family zoning started to make its effects clear in the 80&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;Personally I&amp;#x27;d prefer to live in a nice townhouse in a dense neighborhood but that&amp;#x27;s hard to pull off (location wise not many options, and price wise there&amp;#x27;s just not enough available to make the nice ones comparable to a single family house)</text></comment>