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> The house that the owner lives in is not an asset. It's a durable consumer good. Thank you. I had already figured that considering one's house to be an asset

> The house that the owner lives in is not an asset. It's a durable consumer good. Thank you. I had already figured that considering one's house to be an asset is the wrong way to think about it, but lacked the words for how to then accurately describe what it actually is. "Durable consumer good" captures what a house is and does much better, IMO. Getting this attitude more widespread is going to be difficult, sadly. The land that the house rests upon absolute is an asset, and the house thereupon can't be readily decoupled from the land (trailers and double-wides not withstanding). Thus conflating the actual asset, the land, with the consumer good it is presently being used to produce, the house, is a reasonable mental shortcut.

logfromblammo 7y ago
The location is an asset. But it's one whose value is largely dependent on the value of other nearby locations, and its connectedness to them. As that is something the owner cannot do much to influence individually, that's more a speculation than an investment. I don't think the US will even be able to start on a tear-down-and-rebuild attitude until there is already a sufficiency of housing. As it is now, it appears to be in a cycle of new development, then decline, then revitalization, where redevelopment only occurs when property values in a place have already collapsed, and ruined those who weren't able to move before the wave hit.