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d6e | 5 months ago

Housing can be affordable or an investment. It can't be both

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kiba|5 months ago

Hoarding land and land speculation is really the root problem.

It's not bad for society if it was used to make building to provide rentable space to industries and business or to provide homes, or quite often both, but it doesn't provide easy money to investors.

Now sitting on land and seeing it appreciate with no hard work from you? That's easy money.

conception|5 months ago

This should be an easy choice and yet…

cornholio|5 months ago

The key words here are "a basic" level of housing. A house in the most exclusive area of town will always be an investment (not necessarily a good one), because it primarily offers exclusion of other poorer members of the society from your surroundings, not habitation for yourself. It can't be affordable by definition.

But a basic level of housing is a human right, because it's a prerequisite for maintaining your humanity, ditto for healthcare.

Thorrez|5 months ago

It's also possible for housing to be neither affordable nor an investment. If there's an expensive area of town, and property tax is 100%, that would be expensive and I don't think people would consider it an investment.

irjustin|5 months ago

At a system level - in Singapore it is. HDB (public) for affordable, private for everything else. 75+% of housing is part of the HDB system.

xdfgh1112|5 months ago

Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead. It seems much better than the typical Western political system to me. But then again gays were only very recently accepted there, right?

nkmnz|5 months ago

Counterhypothesis: housing that's not affordable is a bad investment.

nenenejej|5 months ago

It can be sort of both. What you need is more housing built at affordable prices. But dont oberbuild. In that situation housing should act as store of value to avoid inflation loss, but not something that you get rich buy borrowing and buying up dozens.

You need socialism to do this efficiently. There isn't room for a profiteer. You need the government to invest (in the for people sense) in allocating land and building housing. Ideally dense housing.

tpxl|5 months ago

> housing should act as store of value

Why? Housing should act as a means to live decently. If my house depreciated to 0 once I'd built it, I wouldn't mind at all.

> You need socialism to do this efficiently

No you don't, you need to heavily tax empty and secondary residences and the issue solves itself in capitalism just fine.