[vertis]

You're confusing want and need though. You might not like to live in any house, and you might need to be roughly geographically located to do work, but for the most part any house that fits your family is interchangable.

When you take the other things, like job and where you want to send your kids to school it becomes a hell of a lot more fungible.

Given that commoditization is a scale, I would say it could be toward that end of the spectrum if we wanted it to be.

[gameman144]

> Given that commoditization is a scale, I would say it could be toward that end of the spectrum if we wanted it to be.

Commoditization is only a scale inasmuch as the underlying goods are fungible. Corn is a commodity because nobody cares about differences between individual kernels, but if some process came around that only worked with super-specific kernels, then you'd be reducing the commoditization of corn.

I can, however, think of nothing that would make housing even close to fungible. Views, neighborhoods, neighbors, noise, history, location -- the list of things which are entirely unique per property is higher than basically any other market I can think of.

[vertis]

Those are things you're attaching because of privilege though. One visit to China will give you a view of just how much housing can be commodtized. Endless rows of apartment buildings, each identical, supplying everything you could need.

If you're without a home, one house is very much like another. It's only once you have money and ambition that you might want a better view, better schools.

[gameman144]

Treating something as if it's a commodity does not make it a commodity. Treating two things as if they're equivalent does not make them equivalent.

You might say "your right to choose between houses is a privilege", but literally every culture in the world is going to observe differences between two houses, regardless of how they're allocated.

Even considering buildings where every unit has an identical layout, and all residents have access to the exact same amenities, one unit might be closer to the elevator and one unit might be closer to the garbage chute. These are fundamental differences between these units which make them not interchangeable.

> Endless rows of apartment buildings, each identical, supplying everything you could need.

"Providing everything you could need" is not how we define commodities. Fungibility is how we define commodities. One can argue that we should just be thankful with whatever home we get, but trying to act as if they're equivalent is just wrong.

[refurb]

I’ve been to Asia that’s not true at all. Higher floors are more valuable. Views are more valuable. And not even to mention fung shui and the direction doors open.

[jjav]

> If you're without a home, one house is very much like another. It's only once you have money and ambition that you might want a better view, better schools.

Particularly if you're poor, location matters a lot.

The very rich will build a mansion in a beautiful but inaccessible area and commute to work by helicopter. The merely rich have the nice cars to get to work. But the poor have no car so need to be either very close or within public transport (mostly nonexistent in the US) to get to that job.