Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

As a homeowner I see little benefit for me for the insane value of my home. Do I want to pay more in property taxes? No. If I sell it’s to just buy a different insanely priced home. I suppose I’m privileged in that I have other retirement plans so my kids will inherit my home - and that’s good I guess if they ever want to afford a home. Homes being an investment is the wrong mindset for a healthy society. Have cheap homes so you have enough money to invest in something else. I couldn’t care less if the value of my home plummets if all other desirable homes did too. Heck, I’d celebrate it. Seems to me the people who care are those who invest in real estate instead of just want a nice place to live.

It seems like the author is willfully miss-understanding Trudeau&#x27;s statement.<p>Value and affordability <i>can</i> be considered independently.<p>Increasing median income and economic growth both increase affordability, even if housing costs track inflation.

I can’t really imagine wanting to own a house nowadays, given how unstable everything is. I’d rather buy an RV or something like that.<p>Using home equity as a long term store of value seems nuts, what if your town turns into the next Florida (uninsurable hurricane and flood zone).

&gt; To raise housing affordability, we have to lower prices, or at least get price increases consistently below the rate of inflation.<p>I&#x27;ll pick door number two, Monty. Not because that&#x27;s what I actually want, but because I&#x27;m pretty certain that&#x27;s how it will play out.<p>Lowering nominal asset prices is almost as hard as lowering nominal wages. It only happens when policymakers screw up.<p>That&#x27;s what inflation is for.

I can&#x27;t speak for the urban situation, but I don&#x27;t care about my home value (to a point). I care about the quality of my community. I care about that <i>a lot</i>. Dense housing put in an area that isn&#x27;t dense just because the area is high-demand is often not productive in the long run, as the effects it can have on the existing community range from nothing (a net positive though, since now there&#x27;s more housing) to abject disaster.<p>Part of this is housing, but part of it is just people wanting to live in a high-demand location and thereby tempting politicians and developers. You can satisfy the important part (housing) without the bad part by prioritizing building outward. Create more communities, which have the opportunity to become high-demand, instead of destroying places people have worked hard to live in and in which people have developed solidarity and community.

&quot;making housing more affordable&quot; means start to spread, meaning leaving big dense cities where real estate value is absurdly high, to build a distributed population were LAND value depend much more on the local land characteristics (a safe place for flooding, landslides and so on or not, an easy accessible land or not, ...) than human structure around and is a substantial part of the house price. This means build new, well insulated, ventilated homes with p.v. for all reasonable latitude, and so on.<p>Like it or not big cities have a future of big ghettos for poor and desperate and the real estate value there will surely drop retargeted to mere local human exploitability index (or hum much you can milk from the desperate before they start looking for you without friendly and civil intents).<p>Personally I left the big city for a nice mountain area where I built a new home, unfortunately for me my parents (who start to be a bit elder) do not want even if they can economically leave the city, so I&#x27;ll suffer indirectly the easy foreseeable high entertainment costs of city classic buildings (at least here in EU, where most buildings are terribly designed and for another era) then the big drop of real estate value (plus taxes who will NOT drop) but I&#x27;ve NOTHING against that, it&#x27;s simply a fact any rational human see if he&#x2F;she do not want to be blind, the point is that if we start debating and moving slowly with public support we can transform the inevitable storm in an opportunity, otherwise it will be just another 1929-alike crisis probably covered by a concomitant global war.

I&#x27;m not sure this is true.<p>My mom owns a single family home near the best park in her city.<p>The only way housing prices will fall in that city is if they build a massive number of affordable, high density buildings.<p>Which will significantly increase the population of the city, because people keep leaving for cheaper locations.<p>Which will significantly increase the price of my mother&#x27;s house, because it&#x27;ll be much harder to find a unit like hers, and there will be many more people competing for it.

There&#x27;s little discussion about immigration. Canada has an even higher rate of immigration than the US and, no surprise, is watching housing prices spiral even higher.<p>If you build X affordable units, but let it 2X or even 1.1X new residents, the prices are going to go up.<p>The YIMBY types tend to be in love with unconstrained immigration. Unfortunately, more people means more competition for housing.

This isn&#x27;t true at all; for one example, the main reason housing prices are high in the US is policies that exist to maximize the supply (and thus suppress the price) of low-density and particularly the extreme case of that, single-family detached, housing (which also suppresses the value of land, since the land can only be used for that purpose)<p>Removing those policies will decrease the cost of the minimal housing unit by increasing supply, but also increase land prices (by opening up more valuable uses) and increase the premium for single-family homes sitting on land (since they will become rarer), so making housing more affordable will simultaneously make existing houses more valuable.

Government policy is hugely biased towards homeowners and against renters. It would be more equitable to help renters more, perhaps by helping them become (first-time or partial) homeowners. Two schemes:<p>1) Government could put up down payments for first-time buyers in exchange for say 50% of the home equity. Buyers obtain a normal mortgage loan. Such buyers can optionally pay back the down payment over time and get 100% equity or govt regains their share of equity after a sale.<p>2) Government could offer landlords payments for equity in rented property and convert willing renters into owners. Renters can pay back the government over time to gradually gain equity. Landlord shares ownership with govt and some or all renters.

Not necessarily. If you add density to an existing lot, your land increases in value, and since it’s likely the majority of the value of your property, your property probably goes up in value. Then, the increased supply decreases the cost of shelter.

I really don&#x27;t give a shit about the financial value of my home to someone else. Sure, my mortgage is calculated on it and I&#x27;ll be paying that for the rest of my life but the true &quot;value&quot; of my home is the quality of life my family and I can enjoy here. What you&#x27;re talking about is how much money some investor can make off of the desire of people to have this quality of life value for themselves. And quite honestly it&#x27;s incredibly sickening that our world works that way.

This is so fundamental to the issue.<p>It is impossible for housing to be simultaneously a good investment and affordable. Policymakers simply have to decide if they cater to those that already own homes, or those desperately wanting to buy one.<p>I feel strongly housing is a basic human right, and so we should stop viewing residential property as an appreciating asset.

I bought just before covid for 500k. local evaluator says its worth between 800-900k now. (I&#x27;ve done very little to the property)<p>I&#x27;m <i>fine</i> with losing 3-400k value if it means we have all but solved the housing crisis locally.

I think non affordable housing makes values come down too. Just I a less controlled way.<p>Eventually people will just stop participating in the housing game and there’s no telling where that will lead.

It’s going to be very difficult to make housing more affordable with high interest rates and high inflation. I highly doubt just increasing supply is going to be enough.

The only solution to the housing affordability crisis palatable to current homeowners is to build many new homes of a totally different type that can not be readily substituted. This is already happening where new housing tends to be denser, stacked (apartments) or closer together (row houses). Of course there is some overlap, but to the extent overlap and substitutability can be minimized, current homeowners can enjoy their high values that many have relied upon for retirement plans, and prospective homeowners can enjoy plentiful inexpensive housing to “get into the market”, which would help keep rent costs lower too (much more substitutability between small starter homes&#x2F;condos and rentals).<p>Just my 2 cents. If we are reliant on Boomers giving up their house values (which many foolishly rely wholly on for retirement) then there’s zero chance we tackle this crisis.

I think it’s weird we haven’t made any new cities in what, 100 years?<p>We just keep trying to crowd into existing places.

Housing affordability is such a silly subject. We live in both a democracy and a capitalist economy, both in the US and Canada. Most believe those within some locality should have a say over that area. If they do not want more housing because it financially benefits them to enforce scarcity, why should they not be able to?<p>We accept the limited availability of other luxury items, why is housing in a _specific_ locality any different?<p>If housing affordability is a problem, live somewhere else.

Remove tax breaks above $1M or above local median price + 2 sigma.

Why not have 30% max on houses as investment dictated by the state?

Why do new homes have to be built in competition with existing homes? With remote work and the digital elite moving wherever, why not just pop up new developments wholesale, complete with shopping and services somewhere out of the way and cheap?

You know what is neat when housing prices go down? You pay less to upgrade your house size than when the prices go up. Despite the fact your own house value dropped.<p>Housing price dropping is good for basically everyone I say.

Please do, it means my property taxes will go down. I can&#x27;t wait!

Well, I&#x27;m against affordable housing then. Let Blackrock, who bought over 40% of the single family homes on the market, take it on the chin. Perhaps we can do a fire sale of corporate-owned homes.<p>This has made me determined to fight affordable housing even more so. I&#x27;d also like to ask, why is British journalism so shit tier? It&#x27;s a fucking joke.