Jul 22 JDN 2458323

In several previous posts I’ve talked about the international crisis of high housing prices. Today, I want to talk about some features of housing that make high housing prices particularly terrible, in a way that other high prices would not be.

First, there is the fact that some amount of housing is a basic necessity, and houses are not easily divisible. So even if the houses being built are bigger than you need, you still need some kind of house, and you can’t buy half a house; the best you could really do would be to share it with someone else, and that introduces all sorts of other complications.

Second, t here is a deep asymmetry here. While rising housing prices definitely hurt people who want to buy houses, they benefit hardly anyone.

If you bought a house for $200,000 and then all housing prices doubled so it would now sell for $400,000, are you richer? You might feel richer. You might even have access to home equity loans that would give you more real liquidity. But are you actually richer?

I contend you are not, because the only way for you to access that wealth would be to sell your home, and then you’d need to buy another home, and that other home would also be twice as expensive. The amount of money you can get for your house may have increased, but the amount of house you can get for your house is exactly the same.

Conversely, suppose that housing prices fell by half, and now that house only sells for $100,000. Are you poorer? You still have your house. Even if your mortgage isn’t paid off, it’s still the same mortgage. Your payments haven’t changed. And once again, the amount of house you can get for your house will remain the same. In fact, if you are willing to accept a deed in lieu of foreclosure (it’s bad for your credit, of course), you can walk away from that underwater house and buy a new one that’s just as good with lower payments than what you are currently making. You may actually be richer because the price of your house fell.

Relative housing prices matter, certainly. If you own a $400,000 house and move to a city where housing prices have fallen to $100,000, you are definitely richer. And if you own a $100,000 house and move to a city where housing prices have risen to $400,000, you are definitely poorer. These two effects necessarily cancel out in the aggregate.

But do absolute housing prices matter for homeowners? It really seems to me that they don’t. The people who care about absolute housing prices are not homeowners; they are people trying to enter the market for the first time.
And this means that lower housing prices are almost always better. If you could buy a house for $1,000, we would live in a paradise where it was basically impossible to be homeless. (When social workers encountered someone who was genuinely homeless, they could just buy them a house then and there.) If every home cost $10 million, those who bought homes before the price surge would be little better off than they are, but the rest of us would live on the streets.

Psychologically, people very strongly resist falling housing prices. Even in very weak housing markets, most people will flatly refuse to sell their house for less than they paid for it. As a result, housing prices usually rise with inflation, but don’t usually fall in response to deflation. Rents also display similar rigidity over time. But in reality, lower prices are almost always better for almost everyone.

There is a group of people who are harmed by low housing prices, but it is a very small group of people, most of whom are already disgustingly rich: The real estate industry. Yes, if you build new housing, or flip houses, or buy and sell houses on speculation, you will be harmed by lower housing prices. Of these, literally the only one I care about even slightly is developers; and I only care about developers insofar as they are actually doing their job building housing that people need. If falling prices hurt developers, it would be because the supply of housing was so great that everyone who needs a house could have one.

There is a subtler nuance here, which is that some people may be buying more expensive housing as a speculative saving vehicle, hoping that they can cash out on their house when they retire. To that, I really only have one word of advice: Don’t. Don’t contribute to another speculative housing bubble that could cause another Great Recession. A house is not even a particularly safe investment, because it’s completely undiversified. Buy stocks. Buy all the stocks. Buy a house because you want that house, not because you hope to make money off of it.

And if the price of your house does fall someday? Don’t panic. You may be no worse off, and other people are probably much better off.