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No it is literally not making them poorer unless their income is housing speculation.
If you make $10k per month and have a $3k/month mortgage you consumption basket does not change if the value of the house is $1 or $10 million. Either way you have $7k/m for other consumption.
That is not how wealth works.
If only we had infinite inflation. Then I can be a wealthy trillionaire.
Do you see the problem with your logic here?
The problem isn't with my logic, it's with your lack of math. If you make $10k per month and have a $3k mortgage, and inflation results in everything going up evenly by 10x, you will be making $100k per month... and still have a $3k mortgage, for a gain of $2700 for other consumption (in old dollars). Inflation straightforwardly helps those with dollar-denominated debt. But that's cash flow, not wealth.
How are you getting poorer if you make the same income but we invented some housing tech where housing has a lower asset value? Now you have an existing mortgage. Your job is very secure. You love your job. You love your community an never plan to leave.
Literally nothing changes in your consumption before or after we invented this new tech that causes massive asset value deflation in housing. It’s just that the new person buying a house pays less. You can actually not increase your consumption basket and buy a second home because they are much cheaper.
This happened with televisions. I am watching television right now on a 15 year old tv. It was expensive then. Now I could buy a 3x larger tv at 20% of the price. I still enjoy watching television on my old tv that is now cheap.
I am obviously wealthier today because we invented cheap tv technology. In my Milton Friedman permanent income hypothesis I likely thought I would spend $10k during the rest of my life on televisions. Now I expect to spend maybe $3k.
That you have to put those conditions on it demonstrates I am getting poorer in fact.
Suppose I just bought a $1M house and have an $800,000 mortgage on it (I'm in a recourse state). Housing value drops to $400,000 thanks to your new magic. Now I want to move to another similar house in another area for some reason. OK, that house is $400,000... but I need to somehow come up with $100,000 just to get out of my current mortgage, as well as the down payment for the new house. Whereas if nothing had changed I'd have just had to sell the old house and buy the new (aside from transaction fees).
Cash flow is not wealth.
And yes, the same is true with TVs. If you buy a TV for $10,000 and the price drops to $2,000 the next day, your wealth has dropped -- not by $8,000, because no one's buying even a one-day-used TV for new TV prices, but by something. We just don't notice because we don't track the asset value of things like TVs, because we don't expect to resell them.
Assume your debt is like credit card debt and transferable. You would still have zero loss and be richer in terms of what you can buy.
The assumption is false, though.
Ok so you can agree you would be wealthier except for a technical detail of the US financial system
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