[h2zizzle]

1) Housing is not land. Conflation of the two is incorrect, as any Georgist will tell you.

2) The commodification and securitization of housing as we know it today is absolutely new. This allows for new and exciting ways to distort valuations beyond intrinsic worth, which is the only way land and housing were assessed until recently. We did not have esoteric derivatives of insurance on mortgage tranches 100 years ago.

But thank you for the Orwellian insistence that we have always lived in this hell. Speaks to the scruples of those who would deny people dignified places to live because of how they're able to manipulate numbers on a screen.

[epistasis]

Agreed that housing is not land, but when has housing not been traded, either for money or by favors? This is absolutely not new.

> This allows for new and exciting ways to distort valuations beyond intrinsic worth, which is the only way land and housing were assessed until recently.

Sure derivatives are new, and they caused a bubble in 2008 due to giving lots of people mortgages and hiding the risk of the mortgage default, raising prices. Are suggesting that's what's going on now? Because it sure doesn't look like that at all, it looks like lack of supply to meet people's needs, which is IMHO the fundamental immorality of the system as it stands right now.

The help we live in is because capitalists (ie homeowners and landlords) have control of the planning process which allocated how much housing there can be, and they have constrained the amount of housing. Yes, it is Orwellian and cruel. But it's also very important to realize that getting rid of derivatives will do nothing at all to bring down prices, unless there's a pricing bubble. Getting rid of the 30 year mortgage would bring down prices, but at the same time also reduce affordability of homes, so everybody would be in the same situation of a shortage.

The scrupleless housing deniers live in the homes next to us in cities, denying new housing because they are conservative and don't like seeing new things, and backforming reasoning like "it's only housing for people I don't like or can demonize." Sometimes these folks care about their asset price appreciation too (numbers on a screen) but a lot of it is simple fear of change.

[h2zizzle]

>Are suggesting that's what's going on now?

Yes.

>Because it sure doesn't look like that at all, it looks like lack of supply to meet people's needs

That is certainly the propaganda line that is being pushed in order to eventually justify public subsidies for builders. The shortage of affordable housing is commonly conflated with a mythical shortage of physical housing. There is a shortage of affordable housing because residential valuations have risen out-of-step with everything (including wage growth and inflation) except the desired ROI of the securities that they underlie. This is what we get when homes are more valuable as assets than domiciles, which, again, is emphatically not what they were in the modern past (even at the top end; robber baron palaces were not built as wealth stores so much as prestige amplifiers; they were not the investment (i.e., meant to be aold or borrowed against), but multipliers for the actual investment (one's social standing and influence). They often only left the family at a loss.).

We don't need a massive amount of new housing. But I agree that the solution will involve, for once, throwing homeowners rather than homeseekers under the bus.