Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative choices that will make people angry and until then the problems will continue to get worse.

Owning a home creates a stable, personal nexus with a set of vital institutions: Family, community, local economy, government, …

As a driver and measure of well-being, it’s probably at least 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete.

There was an interesting video by Ben Felix that makes a case that home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G_OSohLC_A

That being said housing has gotten worse for both buying as well as renting. I think there is a case to be made that having a place you feel comfortable/home in (whether rented or owned) affects people's wellbeing disproportionately.

Life is much harder when you don't have a roof over your head or when that roof can be taken away from your or take more from your salary than you were anticipating. I don't think people understand the psychological safety of knowing you will not pay a single dime more on a loan for your home for 30 years. It completely erases that worry from your head.

> disproportionately affects people's sense of content and wellbeing

It's probably not just homeownership, but the cost of real estate as a whole. And not even just residential. Isn't the often-lamented "loss of third places" at least in part due to those places not being able to pay rent unless they heavily monetize?

I've also heard the theory that the arts often take off in an area when real estate prices drop and it suddenly becomes possible to build cheap art studios and such. No proof or anything, just something I've heard random people talk about online, but it makes some sense.

Making the concept a little more abstract can help: if you have personal access to capital because you've got collateral, that has numerous beneficial effects, as some of the other commenters here have pointed out. This effect might be less strong in the US because we have relatively well run capital markets that you can invest in. This would be a book length post to dive into all of the details of it but the net effect is plain to see. It's one of those things that looks a little irrational but in practical terms it's a proven benefit.

Manufactured consumer products and food have gotten much more available. Housing, education, and healthcare have gotten less available.

Recently the trend in food and consumer products getting cheaper has also reversed.

> It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours […]

Do a search for "the housing theory of everything".

It has been an idea growing in popularity over the last few years, especially in the Anglo-sphere where housing/shelter costs seem to be worse than other places. (One hypothesis I've seen for this is because of Common law, which can give NIMBYs more power to challenge (new) things.)

Not hard to see why that is the case. No amount of flatscreen TVs is going to make up for the lack of food, shelter and medicine.

Possibly referencing the "Chart of the Century": https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...

When it comes to housing I think the key thing is stability.

Certainly many would prefer to own if that’s a possibility, but easily the worst part of renting for most I think is the need to move periodically, whether that be to keep housing costs within budget, because their landlord decided they’d like to give the condo to their niece, or because the their apartment complex changed hands and the new corporate giant owner is doing a terrible job at managing it.

At least, that’s why I hated renting. If I could stay the same place for 10+ years without getting priced out, without being kicked out for the landlord’s personal use, and without corporate enshittification (which often takes place alongside rent hikes), I doubt I would’ve purchased.

Owning isn’t a perfect bed of roses but at least my costs stay somewhat pinned and I don’t need to move unless I personally decide to. It’s such a weight off my shoulders that I won’t need to go through the stressful ordeal of apartment hunting every year around renewal time just to have options in hand in case things don’t work out.

I love to see metrics that evolve over time. Land is a finite resources, as such it inevitably trends up as the best and easiest locations are consumed. So I think the correlation here has to be understood from that baseline.

Everything better now than it once was? Hard disagree, take me back to the early 2010s

Singapore is surveyed as either the happiest or second-happiest country in Asia (IIRC), with at one point a >95% homeownership rate due to government policy (although I believe that's now closer to 90%, in part due to foreign immigration?). It seems self-evident that having a home is somewhere on the order of 1000000x more important than being able to buy lots of cheap junk that barely matters.

It's very likely. It's place we rest, do some of the fun part of life and a place to call our "own" in world where increasingly nothing is.

On top of that having that high mortgage or even rent hanging over your head, making sure you can't really downgrade work to something more fun but maybe less paid can be stressful too. Especially in the firing season where you might be let go and take months to find new job.

And housing taking higher and higher part of the income is also effectively getting us poorer or at least stagnate.

The articles with similar claim I have seen attributed disproportional value to, basically, stupid crap: better phone, more entertainment (streaming movies), cloth I buy once in a while, cheaper gym nearby, some or other luxury I would miss for roughly 3 months and then forgot.

And that leads us to "only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income" - precarity does matter. If I am one sickness or two paychecks from not being able to pay rent, it causes a lot more actual real material insecurity then "having slower phone while everybody else has equally slow phone".

Likewise, if you have trouble to find a job, fear of loosing it makes you work 12 hours a day in a job you hate, it affects you a lot more then whether you can stream movies.

>policy heavily favor home owners

Policy doesn't "favor" favor homeowners. It screws everything else because it can.

You wanna add a deck to your home. You pay the people the government says you need to pay a grand or two and you're GTG (by which I mean, good to spend further money actually doing the project). Landlord wants to add decks to his triple decker so that he can make the place nicer (more $) while also hitting the egress requirements bird with the same stone and it's an instant 4-5 figure bunch of bullshit where half a dozen worthless interests who add nearly no value in the base case exercise their enshrined in law right to sink their teeth into what should be a petty project.

And it's not just some slum lords triple decker, it's a 10-unit condo, it's those new luxury apartments and on and on and on and on. Everything about owning property, improving property, etc, etc, is ungodly expensive and exclusionary because there's a mile long list of jerks with their hand undeservingly in the pot.

Don't get me started on the financialization that underpins all this, it's just as tileted too.

Policy "favors" homeowners by somewhat exempting them from the worst of this because the buck stops with them. When they get screwed there's nobody else to pass it on to, so they push back.

Your comment got me thinking how youtube videos are a bad place to get any information that is not showing how to do a hands on activity.

Many forms of media and social pressure point to owning your own home as a measure of personal success. It probably is. If it wasn't, rich people wouldn't buy so many. Plus it's harder to kick you out of a place you own than a place you rent.

Additionally, buying a house is probably the easiest way to build some kind of generational wealth. It's easy to see this as yet another way the older generation is pulling up the ladder behind them.

"No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do." - William Levit (the Levittown one)

The catch here is that homeownership rate is the highest in history now except 2000s speculative subprime bubble when a lot of purely investment properties were bought at 103% mortgage by people who could not afford the risk.

[dead]

In almost every place in the world, at almost any point in history, the propaganda will always tell you that you've never had it better than you have it now.

But once you start digging and thinking, you start realizing that it's not true.

I understand that most hackers reading the above sentence are already raging, but were you actually there to know that things were worse in the past, or has it been hammered so strongly into you that you're now greatly offended at suggestions that it isn't true?

What crack was the YTber on?

Income has only raised ~15% (on average), while inflation has been at 30%... meanwhile in the past century, money has lost 96% of its value...

Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...