As long as house prices rise faster than inflation, then that’s nice for the people who manage to buy a house, but it’s common-sense unsustainable.
A soldier returning home from WW2 could buy his first house with a few years of savings. No mortgage necessary.
A few decades later, housing prices rising faster than inflation, and a Gen X yuppie needs a 30-year mortgage to afford a house. Not ideal, but still affordable.
A few more decades, and Millenials face a world where you need to be making bank to even think about paying for the mortgage. No wonder we are having kids later, etc., etc., etc.
I don’t know how net worth and housing will be decoupled, but it has to happen. When only the bank can afford your home, that’s an ingredient for social unrest. All I know is that it’s really going to suck for the people who’ve pumped so much money into their house, when it all comes down.
These comments may also be useful: http://www.metafilter.com/contribute/activity/153873/search?...
Especially the first one:
http://www.metafilter.com/157297/I-cant-afford-to-buy-grocer...
When you say, “you need to think bigger than that. In fact, we need changes all the way up to the federal level,” I agree. The government up to the federal level has been using policies, tax benefits, and direct subsidies to promote detached single-family homes. I think that your solution of reorienting building priorities in favor of individual housing is not incompatible with my idea of removing homes as a long-term investment. Indeed, I think they are aligned: The most economical way to live by yourself is to live in an apartment with a whole lot of other people.
The suburban ideal has cost the country tremendously. Roads, sewers, air pollution, mental disturbance from the isolation, extended emergency vehicle response times, to name a few aspects that come to mind right now. Even perma-camping would destroy the environment if everybody did it. If we want to reduce our per-capita environmental impact, we are going to have to live in dense apartments, and we are going to have to make them affordable for everybody.
For cities to be affordable, we need to overrule the NIMBYs and allow the housing prices to go back down.
Where I’m least sure I agree is with the primacy of single living. A good solution will involve a diversity of housing stock, and we do need more single housing, but any society who want to survive long-term must encourage people to breed and produce a next generation. And once you’re done breeding, outcomes tend to be better if you’re involved with the next generation’s progeny, too. For the long-term health of society, we need plenty of large houses.
That needs to change. If we could get that resolved, you and I would both be happier, even if we still disagreed.
Peace.
In a nutshell, our current housing paradigm was born of the soldiers returning home from WW2. Thus, the entire infrastructure is geared towards supporting single family homes designed for the nuclear family with 2 parents, a stay at home mom and 2 to 3 kids. Thus, in the decades since then, housing has kind of converged towards that standard while population has diverged away from that norm. We are having kids later, we are living long, we are having fewer kids etc etc etc. We need far more housing geared towards the demographics and lifestyles we currently have, not geared towards the demographic and lifestyle of what, for many people today, is their grandparents in their youth.