I believe they are generalizing past owning your own home, to owning _other_ homes as a pure investment. I.e. becoming a landlord. Owning your own home wouldn't require someone wealthier than you purchasing it -- even if it did not go up in price. When home prices don't rise, purchasing investment properties becomes less lucrative and more risky (where as purchasing your own home remains low risk).

No I am not ‘generalizing past owning your own home’. I am saying the official government policies that preferentially promote personal, primary residences as investment vehicles are bad public policy. As stated, these policies have manifested in practice as a decades long Ponzi scheme that is built on ever increasing home prices. It’s not sustainable. Younger generations will not be able to afford housing, as we are now witnessing.

Hmm in that case I think your argument doesn't make sense. "Good investment" regarding purchasing your own home is in comparison to renting. The price of the home doesn't need to go up for it to be a good place to put money, nor does it require any sort of "Ponzi scheme". It only requires the total price of maintenance not exceed the price of forever paying rent.

That’s because twice now you’ve not bothered to read what was actually written. I’m not going to explain the argument a third time to someone who isn’t putting in the effort.

Of course i could be wrong but you seem to contradict yourself in your first reply (You claimed new landlord policies were paramount, then that you were talking about primary residence ownership where landlordship wouldnt apply?).

You then said primary home ownership is a ponzi scheme which I gave an example as to why that seems untrue. I might be wrong here but providing a counter argument supporting why renting should be preferential to home ownership financially would be helpful as that seems superficially untrue.

The argument here is not that owning a home is bad. Owning a home is good. Considering the ownership of your personal home as in investment is bad.

Homes are a great long term investment. However They are a bad source of income. Cash out refinancing is a bad thing, as you are using your house as income now instead of an inflation protected savings.

The pay off from investing in a house is when you retire you live there rent free, thus needing less in other retirement investments. Most home owners fail at this, instead living beyond their means and have nothing saved for retirement.

Homes are seen as an investment: they are being bought with the expectation that they can be sold at a later point in time at a higher price. However, this leads to some serious issues down the line.

I think it is fairly safe to say that the general expectation of an investor is that the value of a home will grow faster than inflation - why else bother investing? This means that the average inhabitant's costs for living in that home (rent, mortgage payments) must also grow faster than inflation. However, the average inhabitant's income will only grows with the inflation rate.

This means that for homes to be used as investment, the cost of living in them must be an ever-growing percentage of the inhabitant's income. And this is what we are currently seeing in practice: since 1965, home prices have increased 7.6x faster than income.[0]

This is obviously unsustainable - we can't end up with everyone spending 100% of their income on housing. The big question is, who will be holding the bag when the bubble bursts?

[0]: https://www.realestatewitch.com/house-price-to-income-ratio-...

In part, because it incentivizes a lack of diversification in wealth, which leads people to support policies that protect the one egg in their basket.

Secondly, unless you own multiple properties, it's a market you can't exit. You always need a place to live so if you sell your "investment" at a market high, you have to buy your next "investment" at a market high.

Combining the two, you get a lot of policies that protect paper wealth not generating much value. I think it was Putin who said something along the lines of "I don't understand the American economy. It seems like they're just buying and selling homes to each other."

"Investment" doesn't just mean dollars, it means value to the person making it.

Owning a home provides tremendous value to the owner beyond the financial aspect.

Failure to understand imputed rents is a huge problem whenever housing discourse comes up.

The OP seemed pretty clear to me that they were referring to a financial investment. I don't think "investment" is particularly useful for describing other value, and think that more aligns with "utility" rather than an "investment".

Along with food, water, and clothing, shelter is a basic thing that everybody needs. Few of us see rising food costs as a good thing yet many people cheer on rising housing costs because they got theirs already.