It is so frustrating explaining to people that for the ordinary folks who only own one home or even a dozen homes, it is NOT a good thing that home values are reliably trending up over time.
If you own thousands, sure. But everybody needs somewhere to live do if you own one home, you don't really come up on top.
And if house prices are lower, it’s cheaper for you to get a better house. I always try to think of our house as ‘well, no matter the economy at least we own a house to live in’ rather than think of its monetary value.
House prices being higher are good if you are planning to downgrade when the children leave the nest though. Or I guess if you reverse-mortgage it when you retire.
If they all rose the same equally everywhere you'd have a point, but that's not really the case. If your home in Palo Alto goes from 750k to 3M and a house in Arizona goes from 250k to 550k you benefit by selling your house in Palo Alto and moving to Arizona.
Thank you for proving how hard it is to get across to people. I don't want to discourage home ownership. On the contrary, I want home ownership to be easier. However, that requires homes to be abundant and cheaper.
We can't have both:
1. Cheap, affordable housing for everyone
2. Housing as a stable investment that keeps going up in value forever
Another problem is everyone wants to live in the same few places. Missouri's average house costs around $250, which is pretty reasonable, it's just a lot of people don't want to live in Missouri.
If you think you're going to get cheap home prices in places Silicon Valley or NYC, it's just not going to happen because everyone wants to live there.
It is so frustrating explaining to people that for the ordinary folks who only own one home or even a dozen homes, it is NOT a good thing that home values are reliably trending up over time.
If you own thousands, sure. But everybody needs somewhere to live do if you own one home, you don't really come up on top.