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Comment by dixie_land | Hacker News Reader

> The homeowners are the ones getting rich.

If it's not an investment property then homeowners don't get any benefits from higher home value other than a larger tax bill.

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Except in California where Prop 13 makes property tax grow slower than inflation (capped at 2% per year). The (in inflation-adjusted dollars) tax on any given parcel literally goes down year over year.

Prop 13 is slowly dying out as of January, though.

Just because you buy a place for you and your family to live in, rather than "for investment", doesn't mean you won't still reap a massive profit if you downsize to a one-bedroom 20 years later when your kids are out of the house.

(Or if you retire to a country with a lower cost-of-living and no housing bubble, buying a similarly-sized house there for lower than the original purchase-price of your home in the US. Which is exactly how every retiree you see in e.g. Thailand lives like they do: they're not living off a pension; they're living off the "nest egg" they naturally accumulated by holding a house in the West for 20+ years before selling it to move there.)

If they don't want the higher tax bill, keep housing prices down by allowing homes to be built. I really couldn't care less about the person who pushes up prices by blocking development having a higher tax bill.

How do I buy a house that's not an investment?

Be poor. At least in California, Habitat for Humanity as well as several counties offer BMR (Below Market Rate) housing for people and families just scraping by. The way it works is you purchase the house a certain percentage below market rate, and when you sell, it also has to be a certain percentage below market rate.

If you sell for the same percentage BMR that you bought, the investment attributes remain unchanged. It's all proportional.

Different places may do it differently, but SF bases it off of a cap for the monthly payment for the mortgage. As interest rates went up this forced the price lower and some people had to sell at a loss.

Roughly its monthly payment => a third of 90-110% of AMI.

Buy a house in Japan. Housing shouldn’t be a nest egg.

> homeowners don't get any benefits from higher home value

You've never heard of a HELOC?

Although it would probably have paid off between 2010 and 2020, taking additional money out of a house with a HELOC in order to invest or spend it probably isn't a great strategy under a lot of circumstances.

>a larger tax bill.

Nope[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Even if you never sell you can borrow against your massive home equity wealth, invest and make more money that way.

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