Three Ways To Restore Housing Affordability
The choice is simple: housing is either shelter for citizens, or it’s just another interchangeable speculative asset in the global financialization casino. It can’t be both.
We tend to think of housing becoming unaffordable as a matter of land prices, zoning and the cost of 2X4s, but it’s fundamentally a matter of values. Subscriber John summarized this in an insightful comment on Substack:
“For me, this issue is a reflection of the values of our culture.
1. Lack of value placed on community means that a house is primarily a financial asset, not a home.
2. Lack of valuing community, means that we have not supported local business / industry and allowed these to be centralized or outsourced.
3. Lack of valuing self-sufficiency means that the only way we can view a house as an asset is when it increases in value. How much income does your house generate every month? (even if you count that income in tomatoes).
Most of the housing being built is nothing more than boxes with a roof no matter how fancy the box. There is no awareness of how that housing is a part of the ecology that it is built in.”
This boils down to a simple choice: either housing is shelter for the citizenry, or it’s just another asset class to be snapped u
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
