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by lumb63 751 days ago
You talk about demand for home ownership as if it is entirely induced via economics rather than inherently valuable. I don’t understand why? There are reasons why home ownership is desirable neglecting economics entirely. Owning a home gives you more control over the space you live in, in terms of the ability to customize the space.
1 comments

That's again a false argument, made a complete lie by the existence of Home Ownership associations and other contract covenants.

Rights come from your contract with whoever hold power not "property ownership"

There is yes some cases where owning is giving you a better deal then leasing in terms of rights and obligations but this is not an universal truth and not the reason house prices consistently rises faster then inflation and average disposable incomes that have nothing to do with the utility value of property as an dwelling.

Ie if we were to go back to an scenario where home properties lost value as the loans were paid off and things got old and worn there would be no crisis, the issue is that the way that currency and banking intersect makes prices keep rising.

> Rights come from your contract with whoever hold power not "property ownership"

Rights of property ownership is always a superset of the rights of renting property. It is not a false argument.

And your property rights come from the contract you have with the state. It's all in the formal and informal contract that govern society, and you can(as most suburbanites have) sign away all of the "control" that you seem to argue property gives you to some collective body.

In the same vain the government(and some wery much do) can set pretty strict rules on what restrictions a private landlord can put in rental agreements and that's before you remember that the government itself have historically been the largest owner of rental properties.

In the old days before the idea that owning a house was a ticket into a higher strata in the class system a lot of the problems now caused by unreasonable housing prices was solved by the government acting as the reasonable landlord, essentially curtailing the amount of shenanigans some wannabe aristocrat could get away with before going bankrupt from people not putting up with the abuse.

In a pure "realty don't matter" libertarian mindset your of cause right that property rights are always supreme but in the real world it's always a balance of power and negotiations especially once we deal with urban communities(which is the only ones where property prices are a problem).