How private equity is changing housing

The reasons for high housing prices generally come down to "government restriction of supply, as supported by a large amount of voters".

There's no other expense where we talk about it as a market, at least in general layman focused new and discussions. People aren't concerned about the fuel market or the grocery market. They're concerned about fuel prices. Grocery prices.

Housing is an exception due to catastrophic historical policy choices to encourage it as an investment. Government restrictions on housing supply will exist for as long as a significant number of people not only have their net worth wrapped up in housing, but who actually leverage themselves and go in to extreme debt to achieve it. Not to mention the attached cultural issues of then wanting "buying a house" to mean "buying an area staying the same".

Concentration of residential real estate among fewer owners is the only path that doesn't lead to the future being housing based feudalism where your station in life is determined by if you inherited somewhere to live, and how desirable it is.

Most people are apathetic about most things at best. They don't "really" care nor should they. They only casually approve or disapprove.

The problem is that we as a society tolerate people turning off their brains and becoming useful idiots if you frame things in certain ways. And so what to the scheming weasels with special interests to serve do? They frame things that way.

You see it all the time on HN, say nothing of "other" platforms. People who have no real pressing need to care about some specific thing will go to bat for something just because it's peddlers say it's good for the environment or public health or god or whatever. Anything can be framed in such a way they're happy to advocate for. It's like an open mail relay or DDOS reflection. This exploit in our society gets leverages left and right by special interests to get all sorts of things that make them money written into the rules and laws at every turn.

These people ought to feel bad for just taking a one sided story at face value and broader society ought to ostracize them for it same as we'd ostracize anyone stupid enough to go to bat for bigotry in drag.

The problem is in the mirror. This is a social norms issue.

Good luck trying to mass build in this financial and fiscal environment. Governments could cut as much red tape as they'd like now to stimulate housebuilding and the market will still continue to build higher priced homes because that's the only game in town now to deliver an attractive ROI.

A fundamental issue no one is truly engaging with his the concentration of where people want to live which has been a combination of where jobs are and the development consumer activities in those locations have fostered to keep them attractive places to live. They're too many people trying to live in too few places and thats subtly due to necessity related to where employment is.

Remote working should have eased that more sustainably over the medium term but society decided it was better to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to that & productivity issues etc.

I agree with you general point, however in the long term, I don’t think this will financially end well for those betting on housing as an investment. At some point, if a loan essentially spans the course of a borrower’s lifetime, it’s no longer a loan, it’s a rental.

Therefore the lender will not be made whole when their debt serf dies. That seems to place an upper ceiling on the (inflation adjusted) growth of the investment side.

People talk about the market for assets: cars, precious metals, collectibles, and houses are examples. They are not normal expenses because you have something after the expense, unlike fuel or groceries.

Assets often function as stores of value, and housing is unique in that it performs an essential function, is comprised of material that generally rises in cost, has sentimental value, and is fixed to a specific location that may or may not rise in value but does in general (you see very little written about the non-housing shortage in Baltimore or many rust belt cities where land is very close to free, or even less than that in some cases).

Residential real estate is one of the most fragmented investment classes in existence. We're so far from feudalism that it's not even worth talking about. If you want housing to be less expensive in your area, you need to be like Baltimore and reduce demand or remove the disincentives from building and allow an increase in supply. Most people prefer the latter.

Yes, yes and yes! That's what I never hear from the abundance crowd, they're always going "just build more homes" while refusing to see that doing so would severly anger the wealthiest half of this country. And in these times where moneyed interests basically dictate elections, this is guaranteed political suicide.

You have to run on agressive redistribution and get your political mandate from those that are kept out of this frankly insane system, else you're doomed to fail and join the other democrats who promised social justice but ended up delivering a boring half-competent technocratic stewardship of the economy instead, and disillusioned yet more people from the "left".