this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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The housing market is just a big fucking pyramid scheme.
Stocks go up and up and up too, but they aren't an essential good (e.g. shelter) or even tied directly to any day-to-day utility. They can also be cut into smaller increments by splitting or via fractional shares, so they remain accessible even to people with modest amounts of money to invest.
Real estate as a speculative investment has been hugely detrimental to society and has a lot of ancillary effects (e.g. sprawl and car dependency).
IMO in a well run country real estate should not go up in value. If your great-great-great-great-grandfather could have bought a house for 3 years of his wages, you should be able to buy an equivalent house for 3 years of your wages, assuming you're buying a similar house and have similar wages.
The value of a house should go up only because of overall inflation going up. But, it should slightly lag behind inflation, because older houses need repairs to bring them back up to the standard they were in when they were new.
Basically anything other than a house should be a better investment than a house: a treasury, a savings account, a gold nugget.
I mean, imagine if there was anything else in the world that went up in value in a way similar to stocks, but was also something that you used. Imagine if, instead of depreciating immediately, your car went up in value each year. Or, imagine if your clothes were consistently worth more than when you bought them. It's ridiculous that houses are both something you use and put wear and tear on, but also something that goes up in value every single year.