I wonder if it's possible to capture how much money is being made by owning the house. So you'd need to estimate future sales price and then remove that from the monthly mortgage price before comparing to income. I've heard of people in London who's asset appreciation makes them more than their wage each year, but not sure how representative that is.<p>People who happened to own property in a pre-gentrified area would have negative costs. Just holding the asset as prices rise would be worthwhile. In a socialist scheme that owner would be everyone/the government.<p>Meanwhile, someone moving into that same area will be paying more for the already baked in price rise assumption which may entirely cancel out the expected future asset price increase. Who pays and who benefits is random and unrelated to any useful economic input, like building homes people want in areas that need people.<p>But then how do you price in the uncertainty? Maybe the market collapses for several unrelated reasons.<p>Feels like there should be an insurance/socialist answer to this problem, where the risks and rewards of property investment are shared between people with no control over them.<p>Land value tax is one element of this.<p>Normalising renting and having democratic control over the landlord/renter contracts is another.<p>Singapore seems to do well with this, but not sure how translatable this is. Feels like the kind of thing that needs to go very wrong before the sensible approach gets taken.<p>Society generally seems to need to touch the fire to believe it's hot.<p>edit: business idea - private land value tax.<p>You buy into a corporation, that corporation buys lots of buildings in popular locations. You pay a land value tax to the corporation and a market rate 'rent' for the building.<p>As the land value tax rises, you might get priced out and be forced to move to one of their cheaper homes (or cash out) but if the land value tax gets too high for anyone, the corporation can sell the building to someone else at market rate, or if the location is great, knock down the existing building and rebuild more compact apartments to spread the land tax over more owners.<p>Basically the Singapore model, but private. You get to live in cool places, move easily (if the scheme is big enough) and profit from the insane property bubble with hedged risk.