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Comment by bananaface | Hacker News Reader

I think the best approach is just to spread the risk. If I own a house and someone builds a fracking station behind it, I'll lose most of what I have worked my whole life to build. I shouldn't be able to buy a house and have jurisdiction over the entire surrounding area, but I also shouldn't be at risk of losing 50% of my property overnight.

To be honest, I'm surprised there isn't some kind of insurance policy that covers this kind of thing. You'd pay a premium to be protected from large value reductions, and the risk is distributed across a large number of homeowners.

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The core problem here is that so much value is tied up in houses. People view houses as an investment. If houses depreciated like cars then people aren't so concerned about the value of there house b/c it won't make or break retirement. Any long term housing solution needs to find a way of preventing houses from becoming investments.

Houses do depreciate like cars. Houses are money pits. It’s land that is the investment. The earth may have a huge amount of land but the amount of desirable land is tiny by comparison.

Lots of people will spend a million dollars on a house and tear it down to the ground so they can rebuild. To them, the house essentially had negative value. The land was all they wanted.

> Lots of people will spend a million dollars on a house and tear it down to the ground so they can rebuild.

At this stage, you're not talking about regular people who are holding their house as their nest egg.

Many, many people hold their house as a location they can put money every month that won't disappear and someday might make more money.

The kind of people that are buying houses for the land and the kind of people that are buying existing houses to live in are two entirely different income brackets.

Lots and lots of people are in the poorer income bracket.

That people put money into their house every month doesn’t change the fact that a great deal of that money doesn’t contribute to wealth building. Interest on mortgage payments, maintenance and repair, renovations, utility bills; these are all sunk costs associated with home ownership.

Ok but that doesn't change GP's point. Just substitute land for house in their post.

It changes the point profoundly. Why would we expect land to depreciate? Unless the world’s population goes into decline (always a possibility), land will only continue to become more scarce. As other sources of wealth grow (and not just population), land will go up in price, not down.

They're treated like investments partially because they have special tax advantages that other investments wouldn't have. So part of the long term solution may be to actually treat them like investments.

So that even less people will have a chance to have roof over their head? Fuck that

Just encourage earthquakes and building on unstable ground. it works in Japan.

Don't give the insurance companies any ideas...

I'd love to have fracking or another well put in behind my backyard or, even better, in my backyard. That's a huge win. My cut from the mineral rights would be a welcome addition to the retirement plan.

Assuming you verified you own the mineral rights since deed of property does not necessarily convey deed of mineral rights, which is a costly process in its own right.

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