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A comment on Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2018). Parent comment

Re:Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2... by Alex3917 on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @10:16PM (#19803971)
> Given that, you buy your house to remove risk of local changes to your detriment.

If you own real estate you're buying into local risk. Real estate generally isn't insured against things like acts of war, so if NYC gets nuked or whatever then you lose all your money.

If you're buying real estate right now then you're basically betting against war, automation, AI, climate change, energy price spikes, etc. Even if you don't think that any of those things will happen imminently, do you really want to bet against all of them over the next 30+ years?

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Re:Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2... by ThrustVectoring on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @10:36PM (#19804073)
What should be more worrying than all that is the correlation between local housing prices and the local labor market. Take Detroit, for example: it had both plummeting real estate prices and mass layoffs from the big automakers in 2007/2008.

And if you're working, you're already exposed to changing conditions in the local labor market. Owning your house exacerbates this in the worst way, just like how the very last company you should own stock in is your employer.

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Re:Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2... by Alex3917 on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @10:53PM (#19804185)
Exactly. I like the idea of owning a house, but the idea of not only investing in the real estate market, but investing where I live is insane.

If I'm in the NYC labor market then I feel like if I were to own real estate then I should be hedging my risk by owning in Austin or something.

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Re:Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2... by ThrustVectoring on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:01PM (#19804224)
Different careers have different amounts of local correlation - I'm planning on waiting on buying a house until I get established as a remote programmer, then buying in a relatively low COL area.
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Re:Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2... by fwip on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:35PM (#19804445)
If my house gets nuked, I'm probably dead.
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Re:Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2... by Alex3917 on Thursday May 02, 2019 @12:15AM (#19804658)
Most scenarios where the U.S. gets nuked are at high altitude just to fry our electronics. If a nuke went off directly over your house you probably wouldn’t even notice for a couple hours if you were sleeping, but you probably wouldn’t be able to live there afterwards either.
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Re:Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2... by dillonmckay on Thursday May 02, 2019 @07:20AM (#19806688)
I recommend watching the first season of ‘Jericho’ to see how a small town deals with a similar scenario.
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Re:Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2... by mikeash on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @10:59PM (#19804215)
What alternative do you propose that doesn’t involve betting against all of those things? Hoarding gold?
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Re:Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment (2... by Alex3917 on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:06PM (#19804260)
I think betting on the tech industry (minus adtech) is reasonable.
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