19 ms·

At the risk of sounding brusque, don't just read the headline of this article and then comment because the headline doesn't mean what it reads like on the surfa

At the risk of sounding brusque, don't just read the headline of this article and then comment because the headline doesn't mean what it reads like on the surface. It's not "house prices are falling and this could be awesome." Instead, the article's thesis is: > So instead of looking at homes as investments, what if we regarded them like a TV or a car or any other consumer good? People might expect home prices to go down instead of up. Homebuilders would probably spend more time talking about technology and design than financing options. Politicians might start talking about their plans to lower home prices further, as they often do with fuel prices. The article is going over a paper[0] that asks what would happen to house prices if houses were treated as disposable consumer goods instead of a means of storing wealth. It also points out, correctly in my opinion, that such a shift would be monumental (if only because everyone would have to do it at the same time). 0 - http://realestate.wharton.upenn.edu/research/papers/full/802.pdf http://realestate.wharton.upenn.edu/research/papers/full/802...

twblalock 10y ago
Incidentally, this is what has happened in Japan, but with one big difference. In Japan, people expect houses to be worthless after a decade, and they rebuild their houses frequently. This is partly because the poor quality of houses built in the first decades after WWII has created a bias against older homes that is probably no longer justified. Many buyers tear down homes and replace them -- this happens everywhere, but it is more common in Japan. People who have owned their home for a few decades will have it torn down and rebuilt every 20-30 years, and they will continue to live in the new one without any intention of selling the land. On the other hand, while homes are worthless after a decade, land is extremely expensive. This leads to 40-year mortgages or to people building homes on land they lease for decades, and having them torn down when the lease ends. I don't expect that kind of situation to develop in the US, nor do I want it to, but it's always good to learn about other approaches to home ownership, because it demonstrates that considering a home as an investment is not natural or inevitable.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  But the problem is, if you've just spent 40 years paying a mortgage (which I assure you is probably a non-insignificant amount of your lifetime income in aggregate), you would expect to be able to recoup at least some of that expense, no? In the US, your primary residence is usually your largest asset, and by its very nature, it becomes an investment that you want to protect. The depreciating nature of real estate in Japan is okay because they're a nation of savers. They have other investments to draw upon in retirement. This is not true in the US, and your home is essentially a forced retirement vehicle (unless you're just stripping out the equity all of the time, in which case you're screwed). TL;DR It'd be fine if we pushed down real estate asset prices if people saved more and needed less income in retirement.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    > In the US, your primary residence is usually your largest asset, and by its very nature, it becomes an investment that you want to protect Why should it be an asset in the first place?
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Because that's how the system was built. Sure, tear said system down. But there will be consequences. You'll see consumption and tax revenues drop through the floor. You've got millions of homeowners 50+ who are expecting to use that asset value to live on, and that will need to come from somewhere else then (most likely social security and medicare topped up from federal tax receipts). We're just arguing over how we squeeze the ballon; the size of the ballon stays the same (for the most part). http://www.fanniemae.com/portal/research-insights/perspectives/110116-butrica-simmons.html http://www.fanniemae.com/portal/research-insights/perspectiv... "The Baby Boom generation possesses enormous home equity, which by some estimates exceeds $6 trillion. Despite this mountain of housing wealth, many Boomers will face financial insecurity in retirement. According to one study, between 30 and 40 percent of Boomers will have insufficient income at age 70 to adequately replace their pre-retirement earnings. The extent to which Boomers and preceding generations might be able to draw upon their housing wealth to enhance financial security in retirement hinges on multiple factors, including: * the amount of home equity that older adults of different socioeconomic subgroups hold today and will likely hold in the future * seniors’ willingness to tap housing assets in retirement * the barriers that older adults might face in extracting home equity to finance retirement spending." "For most households, a majority of their wealth derives from owning a primary residence, and the authors find that the proportion of households aged 65 and over who own their homes has held up quite well despite the housing bust and subsequent homeownership decline. Whereas the overall homeownership rate has fallen to multi-decade lows in the wake of the housing crisis, the proportion of older adults who owned their primary residence was 78.2 percent in 2012, slightly higher than it was in 1998 or at the peak of the housing bubble in 2006."
branchless 10y ago
The cost in urban centres is the land, therefore this is a flawed approach. The land does not erode (unless you live on a cliff).
- chadcmulligan 10y ago
  Is it though? - the reason the land costs more is because of two things - geography (ocean views, doesn't flood etc) and the infrastructure available. The second one is what adds to land value in cities - it's a network effect. Like everything the cost of infrastructure is changing and the rate of change will increase - self driving cars will be a big factor, telecommuting, internet shopping etc. Water and electricity are others - electricity is probably also changing due to Tesla and others. You could say the cost of land is directly due to the network it is embedded in. If the cost of network construction decreases then land prices will decrease. edit: and of course social relationships are the other network effect - inner city lifestyles are an example of this
  - branchless 10y ago
    Yes land is the main cost. And yes I agree it's the infra that confers the value. Yes and because the state builds the network we should tax land. Land speculators spend nothing when they see their land rise in price, it's all other people. So to phrase it differently to hopefully meet in the middle: the land is the cost, but I'm not talking about how much it costs to buy some mud, wherever that may be. The cost is the cost per acre at a given location. You also reference future changes. Perhaps, but we are in the here and now.
    - chadcmulligan 10y ago
      I think those future changes are happening now. Personally I live miles from anywhere and yet have a high tech job and telecommute. Granted I'm in the minority at the moment, but this will become more common. I suspect we are at peak land value, however time will tell.
      - 10y ago
bloaf 10y ago
Isn't Japan a case study in treating homes as disposable? They frequently rebuild homes rather than renovate for a variety of reasons [1]. Some people believe that this attitude has contributed to Japan's slow economic growth: replacing all the homes every few decades is essentially wasteful. [1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-japanese-homes-disposable-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-3/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-japanese-homes-dispo...
- rtpg 10y ago
  On the other hand, rent for people in Tokyo is... 20% of what it is in SF/NYC? In cities where most people do not own, having most things be cheap means less economic output going to rent seekers. It would be nice to have the "disposable" attitude without actually rebuilding all the time. Making as few people as possible profit from rising rent/home prices means it's easier for governments to take policies that prevent that. Policies which, ultimately, improve society as a whole because less economic output is going directly into the pockets of people who are doing nothing except owning a good. A theory I heard about economic growth in Japan is much simpler: Population growth has stalled, so economic growth has as well. Lack of labor means it's hard for companies to increase economic output without improving their processes.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    Rent in Tokyo is comparable to NYC
    - rtpg 10y ago
      That's not true though? [0] says downtown NYC is upwards of $2k, hitting $3-4k in certain areas (1 bedroom). My impression is that there's not much of a way of avoiding this. A quick search on suumo.jp, and I can only find a handful of 1 room apartments (1 bedroom, under 750 square feet) over $3k in all of downtown Tokyo. Having moved many times within the city limits, I would say that, for a 1 bedroom, you could expect to pay $1-1.5k in really nice areas, for something not far from the station. But you can easily find cheaper places if you're willing to be a bit further from the station (nobody wants to be a 12 minute walk from the station), or if you're willing to live near the less fun stations on the Yamanote. But the apartments are still in good shape. Just a bit less convenient. And if you're good living in a shitty apartment (building over 40 years old), you can easily get your rent way down. I just signed for a place (50m2, 2 rooms + dining/kitchen, built 3 years ago) near Ueno for $1500 a month. [0]: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/map-of-average-rent-by-nyc-neighborhood-is-as-depressing-as-youd-expect-082115 https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/map-of-average-rent-by-...
hkmurakami 10y ago
I think that once we had pension fund and the like buy REITs for investment, it's become much much harder to consider moving to such a paradigm.
- prostoalex 10y ago
  Most REITs are built on the assumption that commercial property loses value and follow IRS-provided guidelines on depreciation.
- twblalock 10y ago
  I don't know what you invest in, but my REIT fund invests in office space rather than homes.
PretzelFisch 10y ago
Isn't this how it works in the us? the property you own tends to keep appreciating. This is why house vs condo pricing is so different.
shawnee_ 10y ago
The article is going over a paper[0] that asks what would happen to house prices if houses were treated as disposable consumer goods instead of a means of storing wealth. We kind of already know the answer to this: "Rental cars get trashed." The same applies to housing: neighborhoods with mostly renters as opposed to owners are rarely as well-kept, clean, or as safe as those with primarily owner-occupied units. Treating housing as disposable also creates a significantly heavier environmental burden which isn't entirely obvious at first: - Cheap, short-term repairs and cosmetic fixes create more landfill waste. Estimations are 45 percent of landfill waste comes from "Construction & Demolition" or as the industry calls it: "C&D". When it comes to diverting C&D waste, it's usually only the older high-quality material that can be diverted and/or reused; the rest goes in landfills[1] - Disposable housing neighborhoods targeted as toxic sludge waste-grounds[2]. More disturbing is that a nationwide trend to start treating housing as a "disposable consumer good" already seems to be underway. REITs got their own sector in the stock market late last year[3]. Invitation Homes (bankrolled by Blackstone) has recently unveiled a Ponzi-type scheme to buy up dilapidated houses, smack on cheap cosmetic fixes, rent them out at top-of-the-market prices... all in the name of creating "stock wealth". Invitation Homes IPOed last week. For more on what we can come to expect, see this[4]. In other words, we can expect continual upward pressure on rent not for the quality of the housing being rented, but for the landlords charging tenants more for their liability insurance. No... it's not the supply of housing that needs to be optimized; it's environmental stewardship resultant from even the tiniest bit of unencumbered land ownership that we should be solving for. My theories around how to do this have been evolving on ecosteader.com. [1]http://www.ecy.wa.gov/beyondwaste/bwprogGBCandD.html [2]http://www.alternet.org/books/how-corporations-dump-their-toxic-sludge-areas-filled-poor-people [3]https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/stock-markets-new-real-estate-sector-gives-reits-a-home-2016-05-11 [4]http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-blackstone-lawsuit-20140506-story.html
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
I forget who it was, but they said "Everyone is born short on housing." You bring up cars and TVs - for new cars, the thing actually being sold is not so much the car, it is the financing. This is less true than it once was[1], but it's still true. [1] GM divested GMAC. A/the reason to buy (in noncoastal or otherwise un-bubbly areas) is to save a couple hundred a month in rent. It's limited to people with good credit, so you trade a down payment and fees for a "discount" month over month. There is only so much developers can to to push costs down. I've always bought homes a generation behind the current developments - that's been the happy valley between price and features for me. I also spend well less than 2x salary purchase price. But so long as government policy actively pursues wage suppression, housing is much less of an investment.
- avn2109 10y ago
  This is interesting; can you elaborate on what levers they pull to implement wage suppression?
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    When unemployment drops below a nominal rate, they raise rates. We've had deflation and near-deflation since 2008. They set a 2% target and miss it more often than not.
calinet6 10y ago
Yes, exactly. This scared the [expletive] out of me until I read it and saw it was mostly theoretical, as I just purchased a home in the Boston area. I think as you say the main issue (or challenge) here is that it would be a monumental change in perception, and that the perception itself is not insubstantial. In other words, people value homes because homes, land, neighborhoods, cities, and general living arrangements are valuable; not simply because they expect the monetary value to go up. Regulation of that system therefore might be an uphill battle against reality. In addition, I've had many great conversations with friends in my generation (millennials and whatever the heck children of the mid-80's are called) and the consensus is that we don't actually think of owning a home as an investment much anymore. It's risky, it's unknown whether the value will go up or down in the short or long term, it's costly in a different way (time, energy, maintenance, stress), and it's more about control of your living situation and quality-of-life than anything. In other words, me and my generation are buying homes if and only if we want to own a home, not because we're bent on investing in our future with property. We understand, for the most part, that you need a diverse strategy for investment and the home isn't by any means a sure bet.
- jghn 10y ago
  Children of the mid-80s are millennials. Millennials come after GenX which depending on who you ask ends in the late 70s/early 80s.
  - calinet6 10y ago
    Thanks, super relevant.
runeks 10y ago
> The article is going over a paper[0] that asks what would happen to house prices if houses were treated as disposable consumer goods instead of a means of storing wealth. What, exactly, do they plan on changing? A house costs a relatively large amount of money to build, and is usually purchased by people without a lot of savings, hence the appearance of mortgages/MBSs. The consequence is that housing becomes a capital good, with an associated yield, and, as with all other capital goods, its price will rise while the long term interest rate is falling, as it has been for the past ~35 years. As far as I can see, there's not much we can do about this, unless we ban mortgages. And I doubt that's going to happen, as younger people really do need a way to finance the purchase of a house with only an income.

twblalock 10y ago

Incidentally, this is what has happened in Japan, but with one big difference. In Japan, people expect houses to be worthless after a decade, and they rebuild their houses frequently. This is partly because the poor quality of houses built in the first decades after WWII has created a bias against older homes that is probably no longer justified. Many buyers tear down homes and replace them -- this happens everywhere, but it is more common in Japan. People who have owned their home for a few decades will have it torn down and rebuilt every 20-30 years, and they will continue to live in the new one without any intention of selling the land. On the other hand, while homes are worthless after a decade, land is extremely expensive. This leads to 40-year mortgages or to people building homes on land they lease for decades, and having them torn down when the lease ends. I don't expect that kind of situation to develop in the US, nor do I want it to, but it's always good to learn about other approaches to home ownership, because it demonstrates that considering a home as an investment is not natural or inevitable.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
But the problem is, if you've just spent 40 years paying a mortgage (which I assure you is probably a non-insignificant amount of your lifetime income in aggregate), you would expect to be able to recoup at least some of that expense, no? In the US, your primary residence is usually your largest asset, and by its very nature, it becomes an investment that you want to protect. The depreciating nature of real estate in Japan is okay because they're a nation of savers. They have other investments to draw upon in retirement. This is not true in the US, and your home is essentially a forced retirement vehicle (unless you're just stripping out the equity all of the time, in which case you're screwed). TL;DR It'd be fine if we pushed down real estate asset prices if people saved more and needed less income in retirement.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  > In the US, your primary residence is usually your largest asset, and by its very nature, it becomes an investment that you want to protect Why should it be an asset in the first place?
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Because that's how the system was built. Sure, tear said system down. But there will be consequences. You'll see consumption and tax revenues drop through the floor. You've got millions of homeowners 50+ who are expecting to use that asset value to live on, and that will need to come from somewhere else then (most likely social security and medicare topped up from federal tax receipts). We're just arguing over how we squeeze the ballon; the size of the ballon stays the same (for the most part). http://www.fanniemae.com/portal/research-insights/perspectives/110116-butrica-simmons.html http://www.fanniemae.com/portal/research-insights/perspectiv... "The Baby Boom generation possesses enormous home equity, which by some estimates exceeds $6 trillion. Despite this mountain of housing wealth, many Boomers will face financial insecurity in retirement. According to one study, between 30 and 40 percent of Boomers will have insufficient income at age 70 to adequately replace their pre-retirement earnings. The extent to which Boomers and preceding generations might be able to draw upon their housing wealth to enhance financial security in retirement hinges on multiple factors, including: * the amount of home equity that older adults of different socioeconomic subgroups hold today and will likely hold in the future * seniors’ willingness to tap housing assets in retirement * the barriers that older adults might face in extracting home equity to finance retirement spending." "For most households, a majority of their wealth derives from owning a primary residence, and the authors find that the proportion of households aged 65 and over who own their homes has held up quite well despite the housing bust and subsequent homeownership decline. Whereas the overall homeownership rate has fallen to multi-decade lows in the wake of the housing crisis, the proportion of older adults who owned their primary residence was 78.2 percent in 2012, slightly higher than it was in 1998 or at the peak of the housing bubble in 2006."

branchless 10y ago

The cost in urban centres is the land, therefore this is a flawed approach. The land does not erode (unless you live on a cliff).

chadcmulligan 10y ago
Is it though? - the reason the land costs more is because of two things - geography (ocean views, doesn't flood etc) and the infrastructure available. The second one is what adds to land value in cities - it's a network effect. Like everything the cost of infrastructure is changing and the rate of change will increase - self driving cars will be a big factor, telecommuting, internet shopping etc. Water and electricity are others - electricity is probably also changing due to Tesla and others. You could say the cost of land is directly due to the network it is embedded in. If the cost of network construction decreases then land prices will decrease. edit: and of course social relationships are the other network effect - inner city lifestyles are an example of this
- branchless 10y ago
  Yes land is the main cost. And yes I agree it's the infra that confers the value. Yes and because the state builds the network we should tax land. Land speculators spend nothing when they see their land rise in price, it's all other people. So to phrase it differently to hopefully meet in the middle: the land is the cost, but I'm not talking about how much it costs to buy some mud, wherever that may be. The cost is the cost per acre at a given location. You also reference future changes. Perhaps, but we are in the here and now.
  - chadcmulligan 10y ago
    I think those future changes are happening now. Personally I live miles from anywhere and yet have a high tech job and telecommute. Granted I'm in the minority at the moment, but this will become more common. I suspect we are at peak land value, however time will tell.
    - 10y ago

bloaf 10y ago

Isn't Japan a case study in treating homes as disposable? They frequently rebuild homes rather than renovate for a variety of reasons [1]. Some people believe that this attitude has contributed to Japan's slow economic growth: replacing all the homes every few decades is essentially wasteful. [1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-japanese-homes-disposable-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-3/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-japanese-homes-dispo...

rtpg 10y ago
On the other hand, rent for people in Tokyo is... 20% of what it is in SF/NYC? In cities where most people do not own, having most things be cheap means less economic output going to rent seekers. It would be nice to have the "disposable" attitude without actually rebuilding all the time. Making as few people as possible profit from rising rent/home prices means it's easier for governments to take policies that prevent that. Policies which, ultimately, improve society as a whole because less economic output is going directly into the pockets of people who are doing nothing except owning a good. A theory I heard about economic growth in Japan is much simpler: Population growth has stalled, so economic growth has as well. Lack of labor means it's hard for companies to increase economic output without improving their processes.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  Rent in Tokyo is comparable to NYC
  - rtpg 10y ago
    That's not true though? [0] says downtown NYC is upwards of $2k, hitting $3-4k in certain areas (1 bedroom). My impression is that there's not much of a way of avoiding this. A quick search on suumo.jp, and I can only find a handful of 1 room apartments (1 bedroom, under 750 square feet) over $3k in all of downtown Tokyo. Having moved many times within the city limits, I would say that, for a 1 bedroom, you could expect to pay $1-1.5k in really nice areas, for something not far from the station. But you can easily find cheaper places if you're willing to be a bit further from the station (nobody wants to be a 12 minute walk from the station), or if you're willing to live near the less fun stations on the Yamanote. But the apartments are still in good shape. Just a bit less convenient. And if you're good living in a shitty apartment (building over 40 years old), you can easily get your rent way down. I just signed for a place (50m2, 2 rooms + dining/kitchen, built 3 years ago) near Ueno for $1500 a month. [0]: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/map-of-average-rent-by-nyc-neighborhood-is-as-depressing-as-youd-expect-082115 https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/map-of-average-rent-by-...

hkmurakami 10y ago

I think that once we had pension fund and the like buy REITs for investment, it's become much much harder to consider moving to such a paradigm.

prostoalex 10y ago
Most REITs are built on the assumption that commercial property loses value and follow IRS-provided guidelines on depreciation.
twblalock 10y ago
I don't know what you invest in, but my REIT fund invests in office space rather than homes.

PretzelFisch 10y ago

Isn't this how it works in the us? the property you own tends to keep appreciating. This is why house vs condo pricing is so different.

shawnee_ 10y ago

The article is going over a paper[0] that asks what would happen to house prices if houses were treated as disposable consumer goods instead of a means of storing wealth. We kind of already know the answer to this: "Rental cars get trashed." The same applies to housing: neighborhoods with mostly renters as opposed to owners are rarely as well-kept, clean, or as safe as those with primarily owner-occupied units. Treating housing as disposable also creates a significantly heavier environmental burden which isn't entirely obvious at first: - Cheap, short-term repairs and cosmetic fixes create more landfill waste. Estimations are 45 percent of landfill waste comes from "Construction & Demolition" or as the industry calls it: "C&D". When it comes to diverting C&D waste, it's usually only the older high-quality material that can be diverted and/or reused; the rest goes in landfills[1] - Disposable housing neighborhoods targeted as toxic sludge waste-grounds[2]. More disturbing is that a nationwide trend to start treating housing as a "disposable consumer good" already seems to be underway. REITs got their own sector in the stock market late last year[3]. Invitation Homes (bankrolled by Blackstone) has recently unveiled a Ponzi-type scheme to buy up dilapidated houses, smack on cheap cosmetic fixes, rent them out at top-of-the-market prices... all in the name of creating "stock wealth". Invitation Homes IPOed last week. For more on what we can come to expect, see this[4]. In other words, we can expect continual upward pressure on rent not for the quality of the housing being rented, but for the landlords charging tenants more for their liability insurance. No... it's not the supply of housing that needs to be optimized; it's environmental stewardship resultant from even the tiniest bit of unencumbered land ownership that we should be solving for. My theories around how to do this have been evolving on ecosteader.com. [1]http://www.ecy.wa.gov/beyondwaste/bwprogGBCandD.html [2]http://www.alternet.org/books/how-corporations-dump-their-toxic-sludge-areas-filled-poor-people [3]https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/stock-markets-new-real-estate-sector-gives-reits-a-home-2016-05-11 [4]http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-blackstone-lawsuit-20140506-story.html

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

I forget who it was, but they said "Everyone is born short on housing." You bring up cars and TVs - for new cars, the thing actually being sold is not so much the car, it is the financing. This is less true than it once was[1], but it's still true. [1] GM divested GMAC. A/the reason to buy (in noncoastal or otherwise un-bubbly areas) is to save a couple hundred a month in rent. It's limited to people with good credit, so you trade a down payment and fees for a "discount" month over month. There is only so much developers can to to push costs down. I've always bought homes a generation behind the current developments - that's been the happy valley between price and features for me. I also spend well less than 2x salary purchase price. But so long as government policy actively pursues wage suppression, housing is much less of an investment.

avn2109 10y ago
This is interesting; can you elaborate on what levers they pull to implement wage suppression?
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  When unemployment drops below a nominal rate, they raise rates. We've had deflation and near-deflation since 2008. They set a 2% target and miss it more often than not.

calinet6 10y ago

Yes, exactly. This scared the [expletive] out of me until I read it and saw it was mostly theoretical, as I just purchased a home in the Boston area. I think as you say the main issue (or challenge) here is that it would be a monumental change in perception, and that the perception itself is not insubstantial. In other words, people value homes because homes, land, neighborhoods, cities, and general living arrangements are valuable; not simply because they expect the monetary value to go up. Regulation of that system therefore might be an uphill battle against reality. In addition, I've had many great conversations with friends in my generation (millennials and whatever the heck children of the mid-80's are called) and the consensus is that we don't actually think of owning a home as an investment much anymore. It's risky, it's unknown whether the value will go up or down in the short or long term, it's costly in a different way (time, energy, maintenance, stress), and it's more about control of your living situation and quality-of-life than anything. In other words, me and my generation are buying homes if and only if we want to own a home, not because we're bent on investing in our future with property. We understand, for the most part, that you need a diverse strategy for investment and the home isn't by any means a sure bet.

jghn 10y ago
Children of the mid-80s are millennials. Millennials come after GenX which depending on who you ask ends in the late 70s/early 80s.
- calinet6 10y ago
  Thanks, super relevant.

runeks 10y ago

> The article is going over a paper[0] that asks what would happen to house prices if houses were treated as disposable consumer goods instead of a means of storing wealth. What, exactly, do they plan on changing? A house costs a relatively large amount of money to build, and is usually purchased by people without a lot of savings, hence the appearance of mortgages/MBSs. The consequence is that housing becomes a capital good, with an associated yield, and, as with all other capital goods, its price will rise while the long term interest rate is falling, as it has been for the past ~35 years. As far as I can see, there's not much we can do about this, unless we ban mortgages. And I doubt that's going to happen, as younger people really do need a way to finance the purchase of a house with only an income.