If you want to create value, you should make sure that housing prices (both renting and buying) stay low. This way not only wealth can go to other investments, but more people can take the risk to start a business if they don't have the risk to be unable to pay their rent or mortgage.

It's also hard to feel bad for home owners renting half of the property they live in to cover their mortgage while their property values increase 10% a year. Apartment residents meanwhile are building zero equity and eroding their chances of ever owning property.

Real estate is a hugely profitable business due to the perpetual license granted by the government to extract infinite rent from the property.

I have friends who just pay professional management companies to do billing, maintenance, and lease management for their properties. All they do is write a check to the management company and they get to keep all the profits. No, I don't think what they're doing is a real job, they just happened to have enough money to afford a few down payments on houses, and now they're getting something for nothing.

Bad tenants are probably over represented in the rental pool since they're looking for a new place all the time.

I was a landlord for a while during the realty boom. It really did suck. However, it varied wildly by tenant: some tenants took good care of the place, others didn't. So when a tenant left and I had to get a house ready to re-rent, some were a relative cakewalk, while others required a ton of work (like one idiot who drilled a bunch of giant holes in the walls for cables for their A/V equipment).

The worst part about it was being on the hook for major repairs, and having them happen at unpredictable times.

Try telling that to a landlord. Being one is a job in itself - or you have to pay someone else a good chunk of money to do the work for you.

I beg to differ. I think that real estate, like farming, has critical societal benefits that are worthwhile to develop and maintain.

Namely, it is very difficult to raise a family of four in a mutual fund. Investing in a home may is absolutely "productive."

See, there are significant societal benefits to home ownership that you are not considering. For example:

1. A paid off home is a social safety net against homelessness for an entire family and many of their social circles. Even if all of them are unemployed, all of them have a roof over their heads.

2. A paid-off home frees up cash flow. It allows the owner to divert his earnings into other activities or investments or reduce the amount he has to earn monthly.

3. Real estate can be borrowed against. Try that with stocks. If you are an entrepreneur, your home is likely the asset you will use to acquire bank financing for your business.

4. With unskilled / low-skilled jobs vanishing left and right, homebuilding is one of the few markets which still relies entirely on a giant low-skilled workforce. It's one of the few sectors that can keep a lot of people productively employed. I think there are valid arguments against stimulating homebuilding to reduce unemployment among low-skill workers, but there is nevertheless a societal logic here.

5. In a time when wealth is centralizing as never before, investments in real estate distributes wealth locally. I think there are valid arguments against public policy to distribute wealth, but there is a societal logic here.

6. Finally: taxing a home is very counterproductive to the well-being of the middle class and the poor. I'm sure in Germany the interest on a mortgage isn't tax deductible as you say, but I'd also guess that steps are taken to refund the property taxes for the lower classes. Otherwise you simply tax the poor out of their homes - a form of confiscation.

I think there's a lot of sense in NOT taxing one's first home, at least not if it's below a certain reasonably high value. All things considered, home ownership is empowering. A second home or income-generating rental property is a different story, but one's domicile should be unconfiscatable by the state.

Until you can't afford to pay the taxes, utilities, insurance, and maintenance. My grandma bought her house outright with my grandpa's life insurance money. No mortgage ever. It was a terrible choice because she didn't have the money or wherewithal for maintenance or utilities. 30 years later the house was literary falling apart. As you can imagine, the utility bills for a house with gaping holes in the roof were astronomical. It was a positive feedback loop. She lived with massive anxiety about shit getting old and breaking. We all really hoped her house would stay upright until she died. It did, thankfully. She would have lived a much better quality of life in an apartment.

>2. A paid-off home frees up cash flow. It allows the owner to divert his earnings into other activities or investments or reduce the amount he has to earn monthly.

Renting frees up cash flow sooner thus allowing interest to compound much more.

> Real estate can be borrowed against. Try that with stocks. If you are an entrepreneur, your home is likely the asset you will use to acquire bank financing for your business.

You can borrow against your 401(k). Then there's the people who borrow against their 401(k) to buy a home, yes, those exist... I personally know some.

Anyways, I own a home, I'm not anti-home ownership. I just can't stand the myths about home ownership.

The utilities it's what gets to you first. My parents used to be middle-class people in the late-1990s Eastern Europe until they both lost their jobs when the one big steel-factory in my home-town got closed down. In a matter of a just a couple of years they had to sell our family car and our city apartment (where we were all living), because utility bills have the nasty habit of coming in your mail-box even though you're out of a job. We only managed to got through all this because my parents still had a half-finished house in the countryside which has been their primary residence for more than 15 years now (and is still unfinished) while I got to go to college and managed to earn some financial assistance from my school for the first couple of years (and then found a job during school).

I know that the usual HN user comes from an Western country and has never had to deal with very big societal changes that can see political systems disappear over night, high-double-digit or triple-digit inflation or real-estate values collapsing to 5 or 10% of their initial value, but these will eventually happen in there, too.

It's already happened. Contrary to popular belief, Western countries are not uniformly rich and successful places where everyone drives a Ferrari and owns three houses.

This stereotype is really annoying to those of us who suffered through the industrial collapse and saw the society of whole regions destroyed (larger than most eastern European countries.)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindustrialisation_by_country... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_(... * etc.

The point is that "westerners," even HN readers, are not all a bunch of naive rich people who have never experienced and cannot understand large scale social change.

Reasons aside, while my monthly expenses have increased a bit (not terribly much) I've been much happier and care-free now. The hundreds that I would put away for inevitable fixups and maintenance, I can now put in stocks, index funds. I personally can't hold the hammer the right way in my hand so it's been costly.

It's not customary in Finland to take second mortgages against house so having money in stocks is vastly more easily liquidable as well.

It is difficult to ski without skis. But most people don't buy skis, they rent them. Renting skis do not mean that no skis will be manufactured. There is a need for house, houses will be constructed, irrespective of whether people will over-bid on them or not.

> A paid off home is a social safety net against homelessness

Stocks and savings are equally a safety net against loss of primary income.

> Real estate can be borrowed against

Borrowing against your home to finance your business is no different than selling some stocks to invest into your business. In both cases you are using previous savings.

> I think there's a lot of sense in NOT taxing one's first home

Why? Again you are assuming that the alternative to owning a home is renting one and having no savings. The cost of housing (renting) would be much lower in a country without massive over-bidding on property. There is no reason to give a tax benefit to this particular type of investment (property) over any other types of investment.

Until you have a 2007 collapse again (predicted by some to happen again soon), where you both lose your job and a massive amount in stocks. Savings have been at extremely low rates for a long period of time in the US.

One extreme downside of thinking of your home as an investment vehicle is how poorly it is diversified. It is almost exactly directly correlated to the local job market...and to macro trends like the MBS issues we saw in 2008.

This is what I cannot understand about people who advocate buying homes in the United States for small-time investors - how can you not see this? How does it make any sense to divert almost all of your cash flow into a single, massively leveraged, illiquid investment? Miss a few payments on your mortgage and you are totally wiped out (and without a place to live!). At least stocks can bounce back and maybe you can get 30% back on bad bonds. And no one is stopping you from holding cash or TIPS.

If you are wealthy and a house is a small part of your portfolio the impact of the possible downsides is qualitatively different, but as a small-time investor tying up most of my wealth into home ownership on the hope that "house prices always go up" (which really means treating the future generation as suckers that will pay inflated prices for your home) and that the risk of mortgage default does not exist does not make sense to me.

Stocks and bonds aren't any better anymore--the bottom could drop out again anytime and leave you with half or less of what you previously had.

We're in a crap storm of epic proportions in this country, but we avoid the reality of it.

That was my experience in Ann Arbor as well.

$1200 is really the minimum for a 2 bedroom apartment here. There are a few that are maybe $100 - $200 lower, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Landlords and letting agencies can be kind-of funny beasts, they're not necessarily happy to have an unemployed guy as a tenant even if he owns a pile of shares.

That's a ridiculous analogy. Renting vs. buying skis is like renting a hotel room vs. buying a condo when you spend a weekend in a different city. There's a good reason hotels are profitable businesses: no one wants to buy a home if they're going to spend 2 weeks or less in a location.

A better analogy is cars: what kind of moron would rent a car for commuting to work every day? No one, because it'd be a massive waste of money. Rental cars are for people who only need a car occasionally, or who are traveling by air and can't bring their own car with them. Otherwise, it's much cheaper to just own your own car, so you aren't paying tons of money to some company in the form of profit.

>Stocks and savings are equally a safety net against loss of primary income.

The 2008 crash disproves this, as does every stock market crash throughout history. Right at the moment you need that money the most, because the crash caused you to lose your job, your stock portfolio has tanked. This isn't the case with houses: if you own your house outright, you're safe (as long as you keep paying property tax, which is minimal in many places), and even with a mortgage, the terms of the mortgage are constant so you can budget for the payment and keep that much liquid cash on hand. Rent, OTOH, can change whenever your lease expires, or even at any time if you're on a month-to-month lease.

>The cost of housing (renting) would be much lower in a country without massive over-bidding on property.

And which country is that? Somalia? Every time I've looked at rents in Europe, they're much higher than here in the US, along with cost of living in general, even after our price inflation in the wake of the 2008 crash.

The simple fact is that, when you rent, part of your rental price goes to pay for profit for whoever owns the property. If there were no (or little) profit in it, no one would bother being a property owner. When you own something, you take the middleman out of the equation.

Do you also think it's a good idea to rent things like computers, printers, phones, furniture, appliances, clothes, cars, etc.?

Also, given the amount of labor force mobility in US now vs 30 years ago it anyways does not makes sense to force people to 'settle down'.

The state provides this safety net in Germany. When both my parents were unemployed, we didn't have to move out of our apartment. The unemployment benefits were enough to pay the rent.

> 2. A paid-off home frees up cash flow. It allows the owner to divert his earnings into other activities or investments or reduce the amount he has to earn monthly.

Having to pay off a home binds cash flow at first, compared to renting.

> 3. Real estate can be borrowed against. Try that with stocks. If you are an entrepreneur, your home is likely the asset you will use to acquire bank financing for your business.

Can you borrow against a house you have not paid off yet? I think you shouldn't be able to, since the house is already a security for your mortgage. If you use your money to buy a house and then borrow to start a business, that seems horribly inefficient to me.

> 4. With unskilled / low-skilled jobs vanishing left and right, homebuilding is one of the few markets which still relies entirely on a giant low-skilled workforce. It's one of the few sectors that can keep a lot of people productively employed. I think there are valid arguments against stimulating homebuilding to reduce unemployment among low-skill workers, but there is nevertheless a societal logic here.

Houses are still being built when everyone rents, they are just large apartment complexes. In Germany, the low-skilled workers you are concerned about are mostly immigrants from poorer countries in Europe, they would move somewhere else if the housing industry stopped employing them.

> 5. In a time when wealth is centralizing as never before, investments in real estate distributes wealth locally. I think there are valid arguments against public policy to distribute wealth, but there is a societal logic here.

In Germany, the state distributes wealth directly. (see 1.)

> 6. Finally: taxing a home is very counterproductive to the well-being of the middle class and the poor. I'm sure in Germany the interest on a mortgage isn't tax deductible as you say, but I'd also guess that steps are taken to refund the property taxes for the lower classes. Otherwise you simply tax the poor out of their homes - a form of confiscation.

You are assuming the poor own their homes to begin with, this is not usually the case in Germany

>> 1. A paid off home is a social safety net against homelessness for an entire family and many of their social circles. Even if all of them are unemployed, all of them have a roof over their heads.

> The state provides this safety net in Germany.

Why do you think it's a bad thing for people to be empowered to not need a state safety net to provide them with jobs?

If "most everyone" owned homes outright, then "most everyone" could be easily insulated from such a significant state burden.

if you're using a taxable margin account(1), your broker will almost certainly be happy to let you borrow some fraction of your stock's value as cash, without any paperwork. depending on the value of your account and the amount being borrowed, the rates might even be decent, compared to a HELOC. (after all, their risk is a lot lower, as they can liquidate your stocks on a moment's notice. much easier than foreclosing on a house. and while you're in debt to them, they can loan your stocks out to other people, which is valuable to them.)

(1): holy crap don't sign up for a margin account without fully understanding what you're doing.

I think this is a good point. Honestly, I don't know the economics of how property ownership is distributed in the US, but as a result, I can't say why we aren't all renting from a small handful of giant land owners, who can control entire cities or even regions. For this reason, though I know that the homeowner subsidy is regressive in many ways, and that home ownership isn't necessarily the most productive investment strategy, I'm hesitant to just get rid of it.

Now, you could argue those themselves have ownership distributed because they are public companies so therefore those mortgages are in fact benefiting shareholders, but banks own the majority of homes in America. And if you pay it off and don't pay taxes, the government does.

Basically, unless you are investing in an IPO, the company doesn't see a dime from the ongoing trading of it's stock. So the vast majority of investors are not creating jobs by buying stock. Similarly, most bond investors are not buying new issue bonds, they are buying bonds from the current owner of the bond.

Not just stock: companies are constantly comparing alternative sources of capital. Any increase in demand from investors for any particular source of capital (bonds, stocks, loans, etc...) will tend to make that capital available at a lower cost to the company.

I have not thought about whether aggregate increases in the demand for housing have the same positive effect on firms, though you could argue that increasing housing values creates home equity and the mortgage interest deduction encourages homeowners to borrow against that new equity and invest the proceeds in ways that will generate a higher return than the interest rate - marginal tax rate, such as stocks. But that happens a lot in economics, many seemingly conflicting forces can lead to the same effect.

You could have a stock that's through the roof, but if you don't pay your bills on time that means absolutely nothing to me as a financial institution. On the flip side your stock could be in the gutter, but if you are financially viable and pay your bills on time, I couldn't care less.

Generally speaking there is a correlation between stock price and "health of the company", but not always.

Finally - stock price increasing creates jobs???? Source? I have never, in my life, heard of a company of any size hiring people because their stock went up. That's the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard.

Technically and in the extremely specific case, yes, buying stock on the market doesn't create jobs for anyone. However, the liquidity of stock in the aggregate is one part of the confidence of the financial system. Upon IPO, buyers of the stock need to know they can sell their stock on the market after it fulfills their objectives.

An existing company making a new issue is kind of unusual because it dilutes the value of existing shares which is harmful to existing shareholders. generally a bad thing.

Selling Treasury stock does get new cash in the hands of the company, but usually that was because at some point the company had excess cash and invested it in it's own shares in the form of a buyback, less often the company is still holding shares from it's own IPO. It later needs the cash and re-sells the stock, hopefully at a better price.

I would argue though that the day to day trading of common stock on the open market is the more general rule not a "extremely specific case". Normally, if I go to make a trade in my account, it is not a new issue and would be a coincidence if it was at the time a company was selling treasury stock.

no argument in stock liquidity being a measure of confidence, but not really to the point I was addressing.

I wanted to mention liquidity because I (wrongfully) thought your post implied it wasn't particularly important; is indeed paramount for the stock market to work at all.

Bonds barely trade on the secondary markets. When you invest into a fund that buys bond, it's pretty much 100% primary market (i.e. new issuances).

If the paint in my personal home starts peeling, my incentive to fix it is higher - I don't want to walk down the hall and see peeling paint.

If the paint in a corporate-owned tenement starts leaking, what incentive does the corporation have to repair it? They will do the bare minimum to prevent me suing them for breach of contract. A tenant is unlikely to sue over peeling paint. And they actively discouraged from re-painting, as they will likely lose their security deposit should they paint in any color other than generic off-white.

> If the paint in a corporate-owned tenement starts leaking

LOL. It's the opposite effect. If I own the place, and The paint is peeling, and I have to fix it... then maybe I'll just live with it until it gets worse, or I plan to sell. If it was a rental, then I complain to the landlord to fix.

What incentive does the landlord have to fix minor problems? It costs you more to move/sue than it costs him to sit on the problem.

As a landlord I want my current and future tenants to respect the valuable asset I have entrusted to them and maintain a good relationship. Fixing the little things is important in a "broken windows theory" way.

"the cobbler's children have no shoes"

so it clearly adds value to the original seller

> the deduction began as an unplanned technicality. When the federal government first levied income taxes in 1913, Congress allowed Americans to deduct from their taxes the cost of all interest payments. This is standard policy for corporations: the government only wants to tax profits—not money spent on loans for tractors or a new office. In 1913, the government allowed deductions on all interest—probably because all interest payments were business-related. No one took out car loans in 1913 or paid interest on credit card debt, and the majority of mortgages were for farms.

https://priceonomics.com/the-case-against-everyones-favorite...

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/model-estimates/individual-in...

For someone earning $500,000 a year, a $5,000 tax break is a $5,000 tax break, it isn't going to do much of anything to their behavior.

Considering that mortgages usually require a down payment, you could also make the argument that the benefit overwhelmingly accrues to the financially stable. People that can't get the down payment together aren't going to be stabilized by a benefit they can't access.

I'm very sensitive to this at the moment, because "wealthy" is used as a term when people talk about CA income taxes, which can be frustrating since in reality, much of the wealth in California is enormously under taxed (thanks to Prop 13), which basically amounts to the continuing siphoning of wealth from the young to the old.

Just got my tax bill and I see I'm paying a percentage of my home value for things like school districts, etc.

Why I as a relatively new resident who has not benefited from these services yet is paying a disproportionate percentage of the taxes by a massive amount compared to people who have benefited from these services for decades while paying a pittance due to their locked prop 13 tax rates is beyond infuriating.

Doubly so when those long time owners have captured absolutely massive value through collecting rents and massive asset appreciation.

I'm all for paying my fair share for services in my community. This is not my fair share. At the very least it should be equal if not based on how long people have lived there.

House prices are only high because everyone is over-bidding to buy them. And that's driving rents up.

Now this is different to the question of whether you should individually follow the crowd in a country where everyone over-bids on property. If you don't, you still pay a high rent to repay the massive mortgage of the guy who bought the property. And in a country like the UK, there is a massive moral hazard: because so many voters are all-in into property, politicians will do anything it takes to ensure prices never go down, even if that means printing massive amounts of money, robbing savers from their investments, having negative interest rates, etc. In that world, it probably doesn't make sense to bet against the central bank.

But as a society I think it is a bad allocation of resources.

If I claimed housing benefit, they would look at the formula, and tell me "Your housing benefit is a maximum of £x: if your rent is more than that, you have to pay it out of your own pocket".

The formula dictated the maximum rent for state-subsidised housing: almost no tenant claiming social security could afford to pay above the subsidised amount from their own pocket.

However, the formula accounted for rental prices in the region over the previous few years, and effectively acted as a price escalator. All DSS landlords priced their rent at the maximum permitted, and the subsidy therefore regularly increased with their prices. As a result, buy-to-let became very popular, with a number of training courses/presentations pitching this price-escalation practice, which also helped sustain the price escalation.

As rental prices increased for state-subsidised landlords, unsubsidised private tenants also had their rents increased, both sectors mirroring each other.

The government have since introduced caps to various benefits, which may put a stop to the routine escalation, but it's a good demonstration of some of the legislative flaws. For most people, a place to live is high if not top on their priorities, and most debt advice councilors recommend paying rent/mortgage as the top priority, above every other bill, so even given excruciating increases, most people will still pay it.

There's a reason why even rich, successful businesses rent office space instead of buying. They just can't manage a property as efficiently as the companies that focus on that.

For many businesses it absolutely makes sense to own your own property. For example, if mid-way through a 20 year lease on a building the economy goes bust, do you really want to be paying the same rent that was negotiated during boom times? It could destroy you.

There's textbook theory, and then there's reality. The real world is an incredibly complex system with innumerable variables, and can't be reduced to simple concepts like "specialization". It all depends on context. Obviously for most companies it doesn't make sense to own their property. There's no disputing that, and your point stands. But for rich companies, it often actually makes a lot of sense, notwithstanding insiders trying to extract value for their personal benefit.

These big companies do not manage one single house (office). They manage a real estate portfolio. Most of big companies have a mix of rented and acquired office space. Ultimately, owning real estate or not is an investment decision.

Some big companies, like HP recently, went from owning most of its real estate to sell large chunk of it ... Reason is to get some cash flow and to rationalise some expenses. But not because someone else could manage better their real estate.

Outsourcing stuff always costs more, because you have to pay for the profit of the company you're outsourcing to. It's worth it when it's something you don't do that much of, or aren't very good at, but if you do a lot of it, it's worth it to do it yourself.

For an extreme example, think about printing: is it worth it to outsource all your computer printing needs to a specialized printing company? Or should you just buy a laser printer for $100-500 and do it yourself? It doesn't take very much printing for it to be a massive waste to pay someone else to print stuff for you.

No way. My family of four eats around $250 of food every week. That works out to $3 per person per meal.

The other expenses would have to total more than $600 before we would break even eating fast food every day. The food we make at home is considerably better than fast food, so I think it would cost an extra $1000 to eat out than cook at home.

This mode of thinking is interesting, but it's usually overrated as a way of deciding on time value. Most people have a job that takes some time and pays some money, but they can't arbitrarily work a little longer for a little more money as they desire.

This isn't to say your time value might not be high enough to justify not cooking... but it's usually a complex calculus, that involves assessing what you would actually do instead of cooking (for many people, that might just be zoning out in front of the football game), and figuring out the expected future value of it (eg spending the time reading a book may provide you with future intellectual or financial wealth). But then you also have to factor in the human growth from cooking: maybe you'll be a happier person if you cook more frequently.

This is quite a web, but I guess that's the point in my opinion. Annual salary divided by minutes worked in a year feels like a slam dunk way to make these decisions, but it's really not rich enough.

For many of us, time with family, friends, hobbies, is a relaxing and physically/mentally/emotionally healthy thing to engage in, rather than trying to exploit every waking hour for income.

I think the takeaway is that if you prefer coding over cooking then that's justifiable from a financial and time efficiency point of view. If you prefer cooking and the presumed family quality time over (even more) coding then that's also very reasonable.

Just the transit time for a meal out is already going to cost them a great deal more productive time than cooking would. They don't mention Soylent or frozen meals, which are really the only viable way to spend your time more productively than either meal prep or eating out.

I guess I don't make the most involved meals, but they certainly taste good.

EDIT: Besides, why can't the time I spend cooking be with my family or friends? Not like my home is big, if my girlfriend doesn't want to be in the open floor plan kitchen/living room/dining room and would rather hide in the bedroom, I guess she can. Would be awkward. Similarly for when friends are over. It's not like I need intense concentration while I cook, just enough to not burn/cut myself or burn the meal.

Eating out at a nice sit-down restaurant takes a huge amount of time. I can cook myself a meal at home and eat it in much less time than going out.

The only way it's faster to eat out is if you get fast food takeout, which is absolutely shut nutritionally and will put you into an early grave.

You sound like all the dummies who think I'm wasting time by changing the oil in my car myself. It takes me less time than making an appointment, driving all the way to the dealership, then sitting there and waiting for them to do the work (which probably takes longer than me because they have a bunch of cars to work on and their scheduling isn't perfect, just like a doctor's office), then driving back home. I can do it myself in my garage in 15 minutes. I can't even drive to my nearest dealership in that time. On top of all that, you have to figure how much work time I'm missing in the process, since auto shops aren't open weekends or evenings usually (and especially not dealerships).

Taking on contract work is a non-trivial time investment. I can't just work for ten minutes whenever I want to pay for takeout, I will have deadlines to meet, which means less time with my family. I've done it, no thanks.

I don't think he is saying that. As an individual it may be better to invest in the house. Depending on many individual factors. e.g. Capital gains, timeframe, etc.

What I think he is saying is that collectively it is better for society that more people invest in productive activities that generate new wealth.

It's incredible that we've gone this deep into thread and subthread talking about aggregate economic benefits and not once mentioned families and children.

Never mind the plants you're buying at the nursery - what is the long range economic impact, in the aggregate, of creating additional human beings ?

(which, according to many, works best in a stable environment of ownership)

Unless your family can't afford maintenance, upkeep, insurance, and taxes.

Having 100% of your net worth in your home is very risky and comparable to having 100% of your net worth in a single stock.

Wrong reasoning. It's tax deductable in Switzerland and they rent even way more than the germans

Interestingly, us Germans do not like those much either - mostly because of the associated risks and the Notion that "the small guy" cannot win that lind of game.

There was ... some enthusiasm about the stockmarket in the 1990s, but after the Dotcom-Crash and many people who invested in "save, large, local businesses" like the postal service or the Telekom losing a lot of money, that has waned.

Of course then the capital gains tax treatment would be rather different.

I think you are measuring with unequal yardsticks here.

My ownership of my home provides a lot of active investment activity that wouldn't happen otherwise:

Examples:

- the local nursery benefits from the plants and growing materials that we buy

- investments in home improvements generate contractor man-hours and local material purchases

- as an active participant in stakeholder in the community, I contribute to the governance of the community

- single family homes are valued at a premium to multi family, so I contribute more to local school and municipal services.

Presumably if you were renting

- you would still garden and you or your landlord would still maintain the lawn

- your landlord would still maintain the house

- you would still be living in the community and therefore motivated to participate in it's government

- I don't understand this one at all. Why would a second family suddenly move in if the house was rented?

Landlords don't maintain property to the same standard as an individual homeowner, when they do, they use more efficient service models (ie. a single crew with a single set of tools) to do so.

Tenants participate less and have much lower engagement. They have 1 year leases, and have less at stake. In my community, renters participate 60% less in terms of voting. There are 150 members of my local neighborhood association, and per a recent survey, 90% of participants are homeowners. They mostly solicit membership by dropping flyers and advertising in church bulletins. Per census figures, the population of renters is somewhere between 60-70% vs. homeowners.

The last point is that without homeownership, incentives shift to multi-family dwellings because they are cheaper and more efficient. Single family homes for rent are usually an aberration in my experience. As a homeowner in a city that is mostly rentals the per-unit taxable value of a multi-family house is significantly less than a single family.

Not true in Germany. Most leases are indefinite. As the contractual rent often increases by less than the market there is some incentive to stay put. Also keep in mind that moving in Germany is an expensive proposition as the kitchen is usually not part of the deal.

My rent in the US went up $100+ year after year, rent never goes down is the feeling you get and I've never seen or heard of it happening. You never invested anything into the property or building. Buying a home was freedom from that constant rising pressure, moving every 2-3 years to find another move in special and I can finally invest time and effort in my living space.

That's because homeownership is a norm for long-term residents here in the USA. If long term renting were as much (or more) of a norm, an average renter would experience the same incentive to keep the place in an aesthetically pleasing state as an average owner, and landlords would have to make their properties much more attractive in order to have tenants.

Every office I've ever worked in the continental U.S. was on a long term lease. The organizations I worked for spent large amounts of money to customize work spaces. It is very possible that software firms don't represent commercial tenants, so please give me more information so I can update my viewpoint.

- You might not garden w/ no equitable return on house value (or at least not build a large gardening setup), and landlords feel the same way in reverse (no benefit to them to do anything beyond the minimum once it's inhabited)

- Maintain != improve...BIG difference

- Except you may be more nomadic. Also you missed the GP's use of the word "stakeholder" of which you are considerably less of if you don't own land in the community

- I too don't understand this point...but I think the GP means "multi-family" as in apartments, thereby single-family (i.e. standalone house) is higher "premium" therefore you contribute more. Again, not sure here.

Further, people really do rent the same place for 30+ years when their job and family situation is stable, which incentives similar levels of improvement.

Housing has driven US GDP growth since WW2 or earlier, so that's a pretty big leap.

Further, GDP is a very short term view of the economy. Daycare is a classic example where going from an informal to formal system nominally increases GDP much more than the net increase in value.

The return is the experience and joy of gardening, which occurs whether I own or rent.

> landlords feel the same way in reverse (no benefit to them to do anything beyond the minimum once it's inhabited)

I'm willing to pay more in rent for a higher quality residence. A well maintained garden (or the tools to make one) would certainly count towards quality.

> Except you may be more nomadic. Also you missed the GP's use of the word "stakeholder" of which you are considerably less of if you don't own land in the community

Even if I live in a place for a single week, I don't want to live in a shithole for that week. My experience living in a neighborhood makes me a stakeholder, even if I don't own land there.

I do. My sister likes to garden, and when she was renting she put a lot of effort into creating a large, beautiful garden.

Then the landlord decided she needed to move her ailing mother closer and terminated my sister's lease. After that my sister didn't bother with a garden until she bought a house.

Now that I own my house, I have a 150k investment in the neighborhood/city.

Sometimes I wonder how such layouts are created. Presumably by people who don't have to live there. Or live a very different life (eating out vs. cooking, maybe). That's one thing you can do better when building a house, although when buying one you could probably change it at great expenses as well.

Why is property unproductive? It produces accommodation, doesn't it?

Investing in manufacturing companies makes more factories.

A very efficient tax is the land value tax: by untaxing the improvements on land and taxing the land values more heavily, you incentivize efficiency.

For me, the motivation for owning a house isn't so much an investment as it is that renting and owning cost virtually the same, given that one has the means to get on the ladder.

I bought my first house (I'm 30) in north Germany about 18 months ago, we paid 515k and it was recently valued at 700k due to large improvements to the area, and the renovation of an old hospital site which is now luxury flats and houses, the mortgage (2.5% fixed-for-25-years) costs us about the same as renting a flat (100sqm) in the city, and we now have 200sqm of living space and 250 of garden to ourselves, we also now own, rather than rent a parking space (which always annoyed me more than it perhaps should have)

The capital gains tax is an interesting point, given the rent we were previously paying at 1800/month (warm == includes some bills) we'd have been over 20k/year out of pocket just by maintaining the renting status-quo. My wife and I discussed whether it was the perfect house for us, whether we wanted to take a risk on living 20min north (metro) of the city, rather than 5 minutes to the west, and whether waiting 2/3 years was justifiable, we poured about 70k of our savings into legal fees, ground-tax and the deposit for the property, we figured that sitting on our hands for 2-3 years could cost us essentially the same.

Naturally one can't write-off the convenience of renting and being able to terminate a contract and simply move, but I have almost the same freedom to rent out my house should I choose not to live there anymore, although the rental market for houses ~20 min north of the city will make it tricky to cover the cost, then keeping the house turns into a question of eating the capital gains tax, or paying out of pocket a few hundred euros per month to make the difference. I also don't have to pay €4k for a "Markler" to help me find a flat, and fax me a contract, a rather shameful act that persists in Germany, even if you do all the work yourself, the Marker can still get their commission, legally speaking, they often do deals to prevent you pushing the issue to the courts.

Given the duration of my mortgage, the low (fixed) rate, I can look forward to the last 15 years of my useful working career being rent and mortgage free, which might be a bit too late to build a nest-egg, but it's certainly better than being at the mercy of ever-increasing rental rates in an ever-expanding city. (in my opinion)

I think it might be fair to close by saying that Germans are typically fiscally risk-averse, and huge debt, variable rate mortgages, and the uncertainness about maintenance and insurance might be as big a driver as anything else. There's also the cultural shift away from generational houses (think "Home Alone") where many generations live together longer term, I think this is significant.