And yeah, it was "easier" yesterday than today, given today's knowledge of the winners. Today is easier than tomorrow, if you know tomorrow's winners.
The internet / pop-culture narrative of "everything is against me, I'm too late, and there's nothing I can do about it" is actually great for people that want to go out and do something about it. The competition is sitting around bitching on Reddit.
I was generally taught to buy only what one needs and can maintain, and work for wealth. Maybe naive, but the rent seeking and praise of extractive wealth is noxious the more I learn to recognize it.
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
You don't need to buy tech stocks to avoid becoming homeless. You do need to rent/own at least one home though.
Speculation on land value is non-productive, whereas capitalization of productive economic firms is precisely the definition of economic productivity.
Real estate gains, when they are not from development, are all rentierism, the enemy of economists of all sorts.
The idea that you could build out in a field ignores the true value and the true finiteness of land, the geography of agglomerations of skill and people.
British Columbia looks big on a map, turn on the topographic layer and oops it's all mountain. No wonder everyone lives in a handful of tiny valleys. And oops we flooded tons of the valleys for hydro power too, further driving down the actual available prime land one can live on.
If no one lives in a place there's usually a good reason.
The situation seems the opposite, the NYC/SF/LA/London/etc are entrenched.
https://www.businessinsider.com/dubai-in-1990-is-totally-unr...
Also, while Dubai is flashy, I wouldn’t really consider it a first tier city in terms of actual living. The urban planning is not human scale at all and they just defaulted to highways and skyscrapers.
But I think he means western examples. San Diego maybe?
Land is not fungible, you can't exchance an acre of downtown Vancouver for an acre in a rural area. Nobody would ever confuse the two when it comes to economics!
Land value is all about access, about who is near by, about what natural resources are near by. When real estate prices go up without construction, land value is increasing.
In the US, restrictive zoning limits workers from moving into predictive areas and being able to use their labor for more predictive ends. This has been a tremendous drag on our GDP, while simultaneously concentrating wealth into the unproductive hands of landowners.
The first paper to point this out made big errors, leading to an underestimate of this effect:
https://www.econlib.org/a-correction-on-housing-regulation/
This is the difference between gains from land use and gains from the stock market: one reduces overall wealth and concentrates wealth to those with the most; stock market investing does the opposite.
I am in no way saying that burdensome regulation has artificially limited the growth of existing metro areas and caused a bubble driven by artificial scarcity but the idea that there's nowhere to invest in at the ground floor where it's cheap is absurd. This happens in cities on a smaller scale already. The nice areas are too expensive so young artsy people move where its cheap, make it better, and then it becomes a good area -- repeat.
If you invested in the development of say, Akron Ohio with the goal of tipping the scales and starting flywheel of metropolitan growth and your bet pays off not only will you be filthy filthy rich but you'll create brand new economic activity and real growth. Of course fighting over the same 100 sq miles is a zero sum game.
As an individual laborer your choices are obviously limited to where you can find work but as an investor the sky is the limit.
SF billionaires seem to be thinking along the same lines. If it worked for Las Vegas, perhaps they can make it work for a brand new SF-adjacent town.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/land-purchases-s...
Do you see why?
This is where you go wrong.
Unlike posters defending real estate "investment," I'll criticize you from the opposite end: capital markets are a disguised form of the same old rentierism.
Watch out, lest you become a Clevinger.
Write your own story. Find a city with home prices similiar to Toronto 40 years buy and wait. Toronto 40 years ago was very different from the city you know. You had farm land, military bases, going to Yorkdale by bus was two bus tickets. Toronto has grown the people who bet on Toronto were rewarded. It could have went the other way if Quebec didn't almost leave Canada which moved invest from Montreal to Toronto. The Toronto stock exchange at the time was mainly mining financing.