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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   27678 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Whether it is an investment is beyond our ability to change. Whether it's promoted and protected as an investment is more malleable.

As an example, Canada's new housing minister said that prices don't need to come down. He is promoting housing as an investment instead of as shelter, and it doesn't need to be that way. He could've just as easily said "Prices need to come down because houses are for living in. To those who had planned on downsizing and using the extra money for retirement other purposes, it sucks to be you, but too bad. we'll help you make a different plan. To the foreign investors who bought properties here, I'd like to say lol, thanks for the cash, suckers that this will help us ensure sustainable growth that we can all benefit from."

I live in Canada.

There's no amount of propaganda that can make land or housing an unattractive investment. If people want to live somewhere badly enough, it increases the subjective value. It is fundamentally a doomed proposition unless you adapt a communist system where the government decides where and how you live. Land is such a powerful store of wealth that the primary goal of wars - not just in human societies, but in apes, and all sorts of creatures who fight over territory - is its acquisition.

Even if you say: 'all land is no longer an speculative investment vehicle' - it will not change the essence of the fact that people will start exchanging property rights with bullets instead of dollars. Because that was the status quo, before the market.

bullets instead of dollars

I always liked the pithy Spanish "plata o plomo". Finally an equivalent English bon mot.

There's no amount of propaganda that can make land or housing an unattractive investment.

Okay. But it's clearly impossible for housing to be a good investment in real terms and for it to be affordable at the same time. So the options that I can see are:

  1. Gerontocracy. Buy now or be priced out forever. Housing to the moon. If you're too young or poor to get on the property ladder now, too bad - hopefully you're the eldest/an only child and your parents will leave you the house when they kick the bucket, unless the bills they rack up at the end of their lives consume the equity of course. And if you aren't too poor yet, don't worry: you will be.

  2. Housing supply is allowed to increase and the price is allowed to decrease.

  3. The Japanese method. Housing demand is forced to decrease so that the price decreases. Either cramming more people per household (intergenerational housing?) or expelling people from the country/area. I hear Canada has a lot of unpopular Indians, but note that this still involves prices going down and therefore housing being a bad investment.

Curious if I'm missing a fourth option here.

Economic growth faster than housing price growth

Any operational definition of "economic growth" in this context that results in it not getting harder to buy housing over time means that housing is not a good investment.

It means it isn’t a relatively good investment. The goal is to make housing affordable without decreasing eh value of housing. If wages grew 5% pa, housing prices grew 3% pa, and inflation 2% pa, then housing would become relatively cheaper without eliminating the equity in homes.

To get those numbers, I assume housing supply is rising, but is still artificially held back in order to keep it as a viable-but-not-good investment?

That sounds a little crazy to me. If you could fix the problem faster, surely you should.

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