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by thaumasiotes 7 days ago
It's very easy to see that owner-occupancy is an incoherent metric.

Stipulate that owning a home is good.

As the number of homes goes up, owner-occupancy necessarily goes down (you can only occupy one home at a time). Homeownership might rise or fall while this is going on. But that doesn't matter; the number of homes going up is good, so the fact that the metric falls when it rises tells you that either (1) the metric is "evil", rising when bad things happen and falling when good things happen; or (2) the metric is incoherent and doesn't carry information about whether things are going well.

1 comments

> As the number of homes goes up, owner-occupancy necessarily goes down

Not necessarily at all. Plenty of people rent who would like to own homes too

All you have to do is let the number keep going up. Yes, it's a necessary outcome.
Here's a hypothetical: if everyone owns a home, no one rents homes anymore, right? I mean why would you?

So why would anyone buy a second home in that scenario? Maybe as a studio or whatever, perhaps. But as homes become less useful as a rental investment, the number of non owner-occupied homes seems like it will decrease too?