[yellowapple]

> But housing is an investment, not necessarily an expense.

This attitude is exactly why HCOL cities are HCOL cities, and why said cities have been pushing their low-income residents further and further into the suburbs (or into entirely different metropolitan areas!).

The sooner we can do away with this attitude of land being something to hoard instead of something to be used, the sooner we can start actually addressing things like income inequality. And in the process, doing away with this attitude will almost certainly put a massive dent in the NIMBYism that plagues a lot of these same HCOL cities.

[notyouravgdoge]

Hah, that's an interesting point. How exactly do you expect to get people to change their attitude?

I don't own a home and I've spent a nontrivial amount of my net worth paying rent in HCOL areas, including the Bay Area. Renters want prices to go down. Homeowners want prices to go up. And the world is round.

Perhaps some legislation and removal of zoning restrictions would help.

[yellowapple]

> How exactly do you expect to get people to change their attitude?

That is indeed the question. The people who stand to gain from a HCOL area being HCOL are almost certainly not going to do so on their own. Which brings us to...

> Perhaps some legislation and removal of zoning restrictions would help.

Perhaps. And luckily, renters typically outnumber landlords in these areas, so you'd think that'd be a slam dunk, but then said areas end up with milquetoast approaches like rent control instead of actually addressing the issue of land value speculation driving up rent.

My preferred solution would be to pull a Henry George and institute a land value tax, with the revenues going directly into a UBI program. This would readily stifle the idea of "investing" in land (since it'd be a waste of money to pay LVT on land you ain't using), while not stifling any incentives to develop on that land (since only the land itself would be taxed, rather than the improvements on it).

And then yeah, zoning restrictions need to get chopped down by quite a bit.