Houses are a depreciating asset. They require constant maintenance expenses just to hold their value. It's the land under the house that's the appreciating asset.

Sort of. In a lot of areas, the cost of the house has skyrocketed in the last few decades. One factor is that you can’t buy an empty lot and then build a 20 year old $250k house on it in most markets. If you want to build a house, that house will be new (obviously — relocating an old house is a real pain), and the costs of construction are silly. This effect inflates the value of old houses in a lot of markets.

Of course, in markets that don’t have plenty of inventory of both empty lots and lots with old houses, it can be hard to value the house by itself.

> relocating an old house is a real pain

Has relocating an old house even been done? (Assuming the house wasn't built to be movable.)

Somewhat recently in SF. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/23/san-francisc...

Yeah, it's a thing for a certain type of historic building.

See https://patch.com/massachusetts/lexington/historic-house-mov... as an example

It is done, albeit rarely due to how expensive and complex an operation it is. My friend's mother moved her house a few kilometers across some farmland. It was a rather large 2 story tall house, with a basement. It had to be moved to a plot that had a similar foundation and basement prepared for it.

As the other comments note, yep, it's been done.

It seems there's a whole spectrum from lifting houses to put a new first floor below them, to moving them a bit, to moving them several blocks in a city. (to big building projects too, historically)

I saw a house in progress being moved, 30 years ago. Great thing to take a kid to see!

Is there really a meaningful difference when you’re not able to buy one without buying the other?

Maybe - we’re trying to sell a deceased family member’s block of land that might be worth more in the market if we demoed the building because it’s unliveable.

While I agree with your point about land, Im not so sure it is true about the house, given changing costs of labor, code compliance, and materials.

It's not even really the land, it's the cuts + certificate of occupancy which have both been made artificially harder to get for a number of reasons.

It’s interesting how the language allows a weird cognitive out. It’s not debt, it’s a mortgage and they ‘own’ the home.

Nobody said it isn't debt. The difference is that it is debt that makes sense: you can't realistically buy land without it, and houses tend to appreciate so the interest costs are less of a problem - they just represent the time value of money.

Most other debts people incur personally are to buy things they could save for, which go down in value. Like cars.

That’s the out. I’ve seen many people explain what their debts are and don’t think of their mortgage as one.

It's not a weird cognitive out, there are major differences, legal and financial between say credit card debt and a mortgage on a house.

Cars are a necessity in pretty much most of the country. Even in areas with good public transit, people who are most likely to go into debt to buy a car are also more likely to live further away from public transit and commute for work. Outside of New York, I can’t think of another city where living without a car is really an option.

Chicago. Probably a few other big cities.

Yes, but you have to live in the City. The suburbs are impossible without a car.

Well, around Chicago some of the smaller suburbs have a nice little downtown and are on a train line into the city. If you lived near that you might get by just using online shopping and uber if you occasionally needed to go somewhere. There is bus service too but it's not that good.

But in general, and in the larger suburbs yes you would be pretty inconvenienced without a car. But that is true of suburbs everywhere.

You'd be fine in basically all of the inner-ring suburbs except maybe on the south side.

Boston. DC. Chicago.

I’ve heard Philly and SF as well, but have never been.

Bay Area (including SF) public transportation is generally terrible, definitely not at all a great option for people who can’t even live in SF but have to commute to SF because of how expensive it is.

San Francisco is in the top 10 cities in the US for public transit usage. You can see the stats here: https://www.sf.gov/data--vision-zero-benchmarking-commute-me...

If you are forced to commute into SF for your job, then make living close to BART a top priority. (Many years ago, I met many people who suffered through that daily commute, but refused to make living near BART a priority. It was dumb to watch.) BART is a miracle train system (hybrid commuter rail/metro/subway), even if the coverage isn't great.

Just because it’s in top 10 within the country doesn’t mean it is great and that people don’t need to rely on cars most of the times. “Just live near BART” is a laughable proposition since half the BART stations outside of SF do not have enough housing around them and the ones that do, have high density luxury apartments that aren’t exactly affordable to people outside tech and other high paying careers. Then there’s the question of “do I also work near BART?”, “buy groceries near bus stations?” Or “go to the hospital only near public transit?”. Answer to all of those questions is “No and I still need a car”.

Or Caltrain. The new electrified Caltrain is a massive improvement: it runs at least every half hour all day, every day. I don’t know whether it was intentional on the part of the agency, but they stumbled upon the obvious phenomenon that many people will not use a transit system that runs too infrequently and that, conversely, if you have infrequent trains with low ridership, your ridership might return if you increase frequency.

Most of the people I knew lived in East Bay, but you raise a great point! The peninsula also has insufferable car traffic, but can be avoided during daily commutes by carefully planning your home around Caltrain.

Philly's transit access can be hit or miss, but when transit lines up, it's transformative. I moved from central PA to a Philadelphia suburb in 2006, a three minute walk to a regional rail station. It was an hour fifteen into the city (most of the time), and I'll take 1:15 on the train over 0:45 of driving every time. After a few months of figuring things out, we dropped from two cars to one.

Now I own a rowhome in the historic district of the city, we're opening the first floor as a museum within the next year, and I walk everywhere. All forms of transit (bus, trolley, trackless trolley, subway, light rapid transit, train, ferry) take contactless payment (finally) and these days, rideshare fills in the gaps.

Wages are higher in the suburbs, but I can get to a sizable international airport in 15 minutes by car, to the Amtrak station in 20 minutes via $3 subway, and I can walk to grocery/hardware/bakery as well as bars/restaurants/galleries/venues/museums/etc.

A car used to be a very, very important part of my life, and now it's more of a luxurious convenience.

New Orleans.