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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.
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
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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.
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