alt Hacker NewsEveryone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas.
We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plentiful affordable housing without decoupling this idea. Houses are a poor financial investment once you remove all the incentives involved like mortgage tax credits, fixed mortgage rates, and obstructive zoning rules. Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.
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If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so.
Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.
Even today the structure is a declining asset. It’s just that bad land use policy has forced land value up enough to overwhelm that.
>There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism
What about fewer people with the same amount of housing stock? I'm not even arguing that this is the better solution, but I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.
SF in particular is wild. There are so many people who oppose any and all new housing because "it isn't affordable", as if just not constructing anything, ever, will let anyone afford anything.
> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset.
This conflation is a coping mechanism by home owners, especially the ones in SF (which the entire city from SF to San Jose) is sitting on a fault line.
The main problem is that building is being blocked by several other homeowners who are petrified of the value of their homes falling. No wonder young people are beginning to look to this policy in China [0] - "Houses are for living, not for speculation".
> Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.
In 2026, it is really a bad investment in the AI age and especially in HCOL areas like SF, given the layoffs and the jobs being off-shored. If you were part of the people who leveraged their RSUs to buy, well that is also a bad idea to do in 2026.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
I agree with everything you wrote. I'd like to add the pyramid angle.
Fancy mansions have always been overpriced. For property prices to grow faster than inflation, the pyramid needed to grow its bottom. Supply restrictionism was the ticket. Eventually, every shack was priced mansion-like. This required extracting ever larger fractions of the incomes of renters. Some renters wisened up and bought homes (when they still could). Changing sides, they beefed up the scheme's political backing.
No one cares if mansions are expensive, but basic housing should be extremely cheap. This sounds like a handout but isn't. It's what an unadulterated market would provide. It's what the pre-1970 market used to provide.
That's not to say that markets should be left alone. It's to say that the way this particular market was "regulated" was fundamentally corrupt. We could call it negative regulation.