[kelp]

I think the point of the original comment was that in the US we setup a system where the default way to build wealth is to buy a primary residence and wait for it to appreciate in value.

The "financialzing" is just that we decided owning a home was the best way for the middle class to build wealth.

The downside of this is now every homeowner wants their residence to go up in value. So they support policies that encourage that. We've done that for so long, few people can afford to buy a home anymore.

The alternative would be to 1) not have the gov involved in incentivizing homeownership 2) change zoning and permitting policies to encourage much much more supply

Yes, there would be financial instruments involved in all of this. But it might look more like car ownership, where the asset depreciates over time. (Like is often the case in Japan with housing).

But housing would not be something people look at as a way to build wealth.

However, you could still make money building housing, apartments, etc. Or even owning apartment buildings and charging people to live in them.

[astrange]

> But it might look more like car ownership, where the asset depreciates over time. (Like is often the case in Japan with housing).

This is becoming less true over time. Japanese houses depreciated because they had terrible quality / no insulation / they kept updating the earthquake codes, but they've grown larger and are fairly decent now.

But more importantly, in either place it's not the house that appreciates but the land under it. So the best policy to prevent this is a land value tax, but this very much annoys people who would like to make unproductive use of land they own, ie residential landlords or retirees.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

As much as I am a fan of Henry George's basic take on things, I also have an issue with the fundamental concept of "productive use of land". To require that any use of a piece of land generates sufficient income to pay taxes on that land which reflect the highest financial value it could have ... just seems wrong to me.

I don't want all land in its most productive use, and neither, I suspect, does the rest of the world.

[whimsicalism]

The government can easily subsidize things that it wants to encourage with the revenue it collects from Georgism.

If we want a thing, we should subsidize it directly rather than as a side-effect of a mostly bad policy.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Well, that requires (to some degree) majority support for the subsidy and thus the thing. If a minority (or even just 1 person) has a patch of land, and is perfectly sincere about want it to be less-than-maximally (financially) productive, they will have to pay the full price.

It's true that this problem doesn't arise under Georgist tax policies (AFAIU) for public land, so there's that. But I still feel a little uneasy about making land preservation by individuals prohibitively expensive.

[whimsicalism]

> land preservation by individuals prohibitively expensive.

Only if that land preservation is in the middle of the city ("land preservation" that typically looks like gated-in parking lots). Nature access can and is subsidized in the city.

[bigtex88]

You're missing the main point of Georgism. The main thing is that community-derived wealth (i.e. the value of land, not the value of the property on that land) should be redistributed to the community, as the community was the one that caused that increase in wealth.

Someone can maintain a piece of land unproductively if they want to. They just have to pay for that right, same as anyone else that would want to own that piece of land.

There is a broad range of situations here. No one should want a blighted property just sitting there in places like NYC or LA where homelessness is rampant. However, no one is arguing to just teardown places like Central Park to put in more housing.

[whimsicalism]

If anything, I would say it would mark a 're-financialization' of assets if we were to stop doing that, as given that the government owns pretty much all mortgages we're not talking about an actual financial market in mortgage debt as they normally function.