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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30095 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Of course housing should be destroyed as an investment. Living in a house is consumption. It causes wear and tear on the house. A twenty-year-old house is inherently less valuable than a brand new house. In a healthy economy, a house should depreciate in value like a car, albeit more slowly.

New builds these days kind of suck. They lack a certain classic style.

If my house burned down, I could then sell the charred frame for over $1 million.

I bought the house and the land it is on for much less than $1 million. My wear and tear on the structure and the aging waterheater and whatnot are round off errors in the property value.

So long as tech jobs remain hyperconcentrated in a few areas, housing prices will have to increase within commuting distance of those jobs. Unless we start making Chinese style housing blocks and Chinese style hard restrictions on urban car ownership.

My wear and tear on the structure and the aging waterheater and whatnot are round off errors in the property value.

Exactly. Amount of people I know who renovate and then try to claim that the 5% appreciation in their house's value in the time it took them is value added instead of just underlying market fluctuations is insane to me

This might not be the case in every city but in Toronto when the market was super hot plenty of homes would have increased in value if they burnt down to a pile of ash.

The people who make "heritage building" designations are quite overzealous since it doesn't cost the city anything. It just puts obligations on homeowners.

A pile of ash means that they don't have any justification to stop an owner from building a new home.

San Francisco famously maliciously designates random buildings historic in order to block development. You can't replace a dumpy laundromat with housing, it is "historic" you see. Multi-year legal battles trying to make some apartments. If the local government did nothing, then more housing would create itself all on its own. But instead they fight like cornered animals to prevent it.

https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-saga-of-san-franciscos-historic-laundromat-represents-the-worst-of-planning-and-development-in-this-town/

Anyways, I bet that ""historic"" laundromat owner wishes that a freak tornado or lightning stike would have ruined that building so he could make an apartment complex out of it.

The sorts of people who own laundromats seem more likely than average to arrange for a "freak lightning strike" to cause a fire.

In a healthy economy, a house should depreciate in value like a car, albeit more slowly.

Houses tend to be maintained and upgraded better than cars. I never put a new roof on any car I owned, not even the convertibles.

Sure, and a car can last a million miles if diligently maintained.

I've lived in over 50 year old houses that are fine. Not as some ridiculous outlier like a million mile car, but in a neighborhood of perfectly suitable houses that just happen to be a few decades old.

Houses (the physical structures) depreciate very little over very long periods of time.

I know people who live in 100-year-old rowhouses, in a city of sufficient age to have substantial numbers of them. The neighborhood's inconvenient if you have a car, since it wasn't designed to accommodate parking, but the houses themselves are perfectly liveable.

It can, but the result will likely be you pay a lot more than replacing it a few times. And the result will still be a million mile car with high maintenance costs. So it makes less sense to keep maintaning an old car, and as a result they lose their value. It only very rarely makes financial sense to tear down a house and build anew, so old houses maintain their value.

Of course in areas where the land is far more valuable than the house, there's the additional factor of the land not suffering appreciable wear and tear.

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