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The political issue for 2040 is going to be countries in demographic crises pretty much everywhere trying to drastically change housing, employment, and childca

The political issue for 2040 is going to be countries in demographic crises pretty much everywhere trying to drastically change housing, employment, and childcare to try to get their populations to reproduce. The rent seeking which has made so much of people’s lifetime income dedicated to housing which is getting progressively smaller makes investing or just affording children unreasonable to very many people. Society will need to reorganize itself so that people can have children younger and afford the space to raise them in comfortably which means working parents who can hire childcare so that they can have lives outside of only raising children. This doesn’t happen with high density city property development which is about the only thing people advocate for. We need zoning in cities that forces the presence of big spaces for people that actually want them including parking for vehicles and significant tax penalties for vacancy. Housing needs to be a bad investment. Facebook ads seem to think I’ma real estate investor and one of the ads I’m seeing a lot is bragging about sixty percent returns on property development projects. That is not adding value and charging appropriately for it, it’s just theft.

burlesona 4y ago
I think you're very confused about how development in cities works. It's the parking requirements, large lot requirements, large size requirements etc., plus the general absurd difficulty of getting any kind of permit to build anything anywhere, that makes housing so expensive in the first place. If we took a pro-development attitude and made it easy to build everything by relaxing requirements, the market would respond with a much broader variety of housing options, including some large family-oriented spaces but also a lot of small single-person oriented spaces. As you say "housing should be a bad investment," I think that's true to a degree, but the best way to make that happen is to relax the rules and make it an extremely competitive market with abundant supply. Then the price of housing would be mostly determined by the cost of construction, which would be much cheaper than the current market where prices are driven by scarcity to societally damaging heights.
- idlehand 4y ago
  Absolutely right. Unfortunately, this won't come to pass. Housing is the one point of leverage my parents generation have over my generation. It will be the leverage of my generation over my children's generation. By keeping homes scarce, we create an asset class that old people naturally have more of, since they bought in earlier. And we will need all the leverage we can get when every working age person has to support one or more retired people.
codekansas 4y ago
Building housing should actually be a great investment, owning housing should be a bad investment. The problem is that with construction being so mired in inefficiency and red tape, there has to be an expectation of many years of great returns in order for anything to be built.

burlesona 4y ago

I think you're very confused about how development in cities works. It's the parking requirements, large lot requirements, large size requirements etc., plus the general absurd difficulty of getting any kind of permit to build anything anywhere, that makes housing so expensive in the first place. If we took a pro-development attitude and made it easy to build everything by relaxing requirements, the market would respond with a much broader variety of housing options, including some large family-oriented spaces but also a lot of small single-person oriented spaces. As you say "housing should be a bad investment," I think that's true to a degree, but the best way to make that happen is to relax the rules and make it an extremely competitive market with abundant supply. Then the price of housing would be mostly determined by the cost of construction, which would be much cheaper than the current market where prices are driven by scarcity to societally damaging heights.

idlehand 4y ago
Absolutely right. Unfortunately, this won't come to pass. Housing is the one point of leverage my parents generation have over my generation. It will be the leverage of my generation over my children's generation. By keeping homes scarce, we create an asset class that old people naturally have more of, since they bought in earlier. And we will need all the leverage we can get when every working age person has to support one or more retired people.

codekansas 4y ago

Building housing should actually be a great investment, owning housing should be a bad investment. The problem is that with construction being so mired in inefficiency and red tape, there has to be an expectation of many years of great returns in order for anything to be built.